Merging Driver Assistance Decision System Using Occupancy Grid-Based Traffic Situation Representation

Research on advanced driver-assistance systems (ADASs) aims at increasing traffic safety. In such systems, assistance of maneuver decision making is a hot research topic. This paper proposes a merging assistance decision system, to perceive the dynamic and real-time environment of vehicles and provide decisions of merging maneuvers during urban driving. In particular, the algorithmic background for this system is described. According to detect and track lane marking by image processing, a compact representation of the region of interest (ROI) in driving environment based on an occupancy grid is constructed. Then sensor measurements of vehicles are mapped into the grid. Finally, we formulate the merging assistance decision system to recommend the required acceleration to safely merging. Real world traffic data is used to simulate and verify the proposed system and algorithm.