Cooperative Connected Smart Road Infrastructure and Autonomous Vehicles for Safe Driving

Connected vehicles (CV) and automated vehicles (AV) are promising technologies for reducing road accidents and improving road efficiency. Significant advances have been achieved for AV and CV technologies, but they both have inherent shortcomings such line of sight sensing for AV. Connected autonomous vehicles (CAV) has been proposed to address the problems through sharing sensing and cooperative driving. While the focus of the research on CAV has been on the vehicles so far, cooperative and connected smart road infrastructure can play a critical role to enhance CAV and safe driving. In this paper we present an investigation of connected smart road infrastructure and AVs (CRAV). We discuss the potentials and challenges of CRAV, then propose a scalable simulation framework for the CRAV to facilitate fast, economic and quantitative study of CRAV. A case study of CRAV on smart road side unit (RSU) assisted vulnerable road users (VRU) collision warning is conducted, where the identification of VRU such as pedestrians on the road by the AVs is compared with and without RSU assistance. The impact of the location of RSUs on avoiding potential collisions is evaluated for vehicles with different sensor configurations. Preliminary simulation results show that with the support of smart RSUs, the CAVs could be notified of the existence of the VRUs on the road by the RSUs much earlier than they can detect with their own onboard sensors, and collisions with VRUs can be reduced. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed CRAV simulation framework and the great potentials of CRAV.