Self-driving cars for a safer future

Galina Sidorenko believes that we are one step forward towards the final goal – the operation of fully autonomous vehicles on public roads. But there are many safety issues that delay the entry of driverless cars from roaming on the cities’ streets today. One of the key technologies of safety enhancement in traffic is wireless communication. Galina is a part of the research project SafeSmart, and the focus in her research is on what conditions guarantee safety in emergency braking scenarios for platoon-like formations of vehicles.

“A platoon comprises a string of vehicles driving closely behind each other. The first vehicle at the head of the platoon acts as the leader and the vehicles behind mimic movements of the leader due to the use of automated driving systems and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. Short distances between vehicles allow for better road utilization and decreased fuel consumption, however, with the increased risk of rear-end collisions”, Galina Sidorenko explains.

Wireless solutions for increased safety

Galina Sidorenko has researched the minimum distances between vehicles in a platoon to guarantee a predefined high level of safety. Here, V2V is the main tool that can significantly help prevent rear-end collisions, since it allows receiving critical information substantially faster than driver reaction time or response time of onboard sensors, such as radars. The current paradigm of the self-driving car manufacturers on enabling fully autonomous vehicles is mainly based on line-of-sight sensors. So, the current standard to make fully autonomous vehicles is based on onboard sensors.

“Onboard sensors only work in their line-of-sight. Thus, automated systems based on their measurements cannot perceive the impendent collision if the reason for braking is hidden by adjacent vehicles”, says Galina Sidorenko.

Shorter safety distance

Another question Galina Sidorenko addressed in her research is how much closer you can drive to the preceding car if vehicles wirelessly communicate with each other. When comparing the V2V-based solution with a classical automatic emergency braking system (AEBS) based on onboard sensors measurements, she found that AEBS requires longer distances between vehicles than the wireless-based solution. For high velocities, it is true even with relatively poor communication quality.

“My research presents computationally efficient methods and algorithms for calculating the minimum inter-vehicle distances that allow avoiding rear-end collisions in a string of vehicles with a high predefined guarantee. Furthermore, these safe distances are explicitly dependent on the quality of wireless communication links”, says Galina Sidorenko.

Collaboration for new solutions

Galina Sidorenko has collaborated with numerous research colleagues, both from Halmstad University and Hamburg University of Technology. Her main collaborator from the industrial side, Katrin Sjöberg, a standardization expert in wireless communication who has formerly worked at Scania, was a great asset in her thesis work.

“She gave me a great insight into what problems are interesting to the industry. I think all my results confirmed what researchers and engineers knew before – that V2V communication has a great potential in preventing rear-end collisions”, Galina Sidorenko says and continues:

“My study quantified those potentials and expressed them in analytical form. I am proud of what I achieved and the publications I published with my colleagues”, Galina Sidorenko concludes.

Text: Hanna Liljegren
Top illustration: iStock
Photo: Hanna Liljegren