Cooperative Driving: Taking Telematics to the Next Level

While existing telematics services largely focus on improving mobility and comfort, an upcoming generation of car-centric services will target vehicle and driver safety. Future vehicles will serve as sensors and actuators — and they will be connected by communication links. In new services, information communicated from outside the vehicle or obtained from an adaptive map database will be used as an additional sensor for driver assistance — and potentially at one point for vehicle control. Utilizing higher positioning accuracy and reduced communication latency, telematics will enable new safety applications ranging from alerting the driver about an imminent danger to active interference into the vehicle controls. Examples of such services are hazard warning or collision avoidance. Most of those applications require a sense of the environment of the vehicle as well as information about the traffic ahead including cross-traffic. Telematics extends on-board sensors, permits to communicate intentions, and facilitates road courtesy. It opens the path to an application domain which we call cooperative driving. Traffic adaptive behavior and harmonious driving can solve the conflict of safety and efficiency in dense traffic. Cooperative driving is the ultimate behavior in traffic. It means to gather information and share it with other drivers, to adapt to the surrounding traffic and environment conditions, to interact with other traffic participants in a solution-oriented way, and to obey traffic rules and regulations. The most prominent goals of cooperative driving are to increase traffic safety and traffic flow.