V2V-based Collision-avoidance Decision Strategy for Autonomous Vehicles Interacting with Fully Occluded Pedestrians at Midblock on Multilane Roadways

ABSTRACT Pedestrian occlusion is challenging for autonomous vehicles (AVs) at midblock locations on multilane roadways because an AV cannot detect crossing pedestrians that are fully occluded by downstream vehicles in adjacent lanes. This paper tests the capability of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication between an AV and its downstream vehicles to share midblock pedestrian crossings information. The researchers developed a V2V-based collision-avoidance decision strategy and compared it to a base scenario (i.e., decision strategy without the utilization of V2V). Simulation results showed that for the base scenario, the near-zero time-to-collision (TTC) indicated no time for the AV to take appropriate action and resulted in dramatic braking followed by collisions. But the V2V-based collision-avoidance decision strategy allowed for a proportional braking approach to increase the TTC allowing the pedestrian to cross safely. To conclude, the V2V-based collision-avoidance decision strategy has higher safety benefits for an AV interacting with fully occluded pedestrians at midblock locations on multilane roadways. Key Words: Autonomous vehicle (AV); Fully occluded pedestrian; Collision-avoidance decisions; Time-to-collision (TTC); Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication INTRODUCTION One of the safety challenges for autonomous vehicles (AVs) in the absence of connectivity is occluded pedestrians because AVs could not detect the occluded pedestrians in time to take evasive actions (Shetty et al., 2021).