A Method for Pedestrian Position Estimation using Inter-Vehicle Communication

In this paper, we propose a method for detecting the positions of pedestrians by cooperation of multiple cars with directional antennas to support drivers for pedestrian safety. In the method, each pedestrian carries a device which periodically transmits a beacon with a unique ID, and each car passing near the pedestrian receives the beacon by a directional antenna and measures the distance and the angle of arrival. We assume the distribution of the measurement errors to be a normal distribution, and the system calculates the existence probabilities of each pedestrian at each point. By exchanging information of the probabilities between cars, the area with high existence probability is narrowed down. In this paper, we first describe the situations where detecting positions of pedestrians greatly contribute to pedestrian safety, and then we describe the probability model used in our method, the method for calculating existence probabilities from information from multiple cars, and the protocol for exchanging the probability information between cars. We evaluated our method on QualNet simulator, and confirmed that the positions can be detected accurately enough for practical uses.