Driving Assistance System at T-Junctions in Mauritius using V2V Communication

As the number of cars is increasing across the island of Mauritius, the number of accidents is also rising. Besides, accidents are also responsible for lifetime disabilities and young Mauritians are mostly the victims of this tragedy. Also, most road accidents in Mauritius are recorded at junctions. Drivers find it difficult to make critical decisions at these points on the street due to improper design of the junctions, human error, bad weather conditions and others. To reduce the global number of deaths due to road accidents, car manufacturers are equipping cars with sensors. However, the sensors have their own limitations in terms of their distance to predict any danger. In this work, the Vehicle-to Vehicle (V2V) concept was analysed and used to build a prototype to be used as an alternative for the default Dedicated Short Ray Communication (DSRC) which is still being developed and standardised. A T-junction assistance system on an Android’s smart device was developed that alerts a driver of a potential car near its vehicle. The system made use of the phone’s GPS system to get its location coordinates and uses nRF24L01+ modules to send the coordinates to cars near the T-junction. After successfully deploying the whole T-junction Aid system, several tests were carried out to rate its strengths and weaknesses which can be further extended to develop a system providing more features. The presence of the two cars used during testing were detected on multiple occasions.