Toward Context Awareness for Cooperative Vulnerable Road User Collision Avoidance: Incorporating Related Contextual Information

Recent approaches for increasing road safety for vulnerable road users (VRUs), like pedestrians or cyclists, propose the usage of mobile devices for exchanging movement and context information. This additional information about VRUs allows one, for example, to track their movements even in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) conditions. However, the usage of mobile devices for cooperative approaches also poses new challenges, like the high energy demand for exchanging and transmitting movement information or the inadequate position accuracy of current smartphones. Recent publications for cooperative VRU collision avoidance have successfully proven to address those challenges by using additional VRU-related contextual information. This article provides an in-depth analysis of how various kinds of VRU-related contextual information can support cooperative VRU collision avoidance and mitigate limitations that arise from using mobile devices. As one use case for using contextual information, we evaluate how a curb-detection module can increase the VRU’s position accuracy and thereby significantly decrease the false alarm probability in a near-miss scenario.