Towards improving driver situation awareness at intersections

Providing safety critical information to the driver is vital in reducing road accidents, especially at intersections. Intersections are complex to deal with due to the presence of large number of vehicle and pedestrian activities, and possible occlusions. Information available from only the sensors onboard a vehicle has limited value in this scenario. In this paper, we propose to utilize sensors on-board the vehicle of interest as well as the sensors that are mounted on nearby vehicles to enhance the driver situation awareness. The resulting major research challenge of sensor registration with moving observers is solved using a mutual information based technique. The response of the sensors to common causes are identified and exploited for computing their unknown relative locations. Experimental results, for a mock up traffic intersection in which mobile robots equipped with laser range finders are used, are presented to demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed technique.