Distributed Algorithm for Collision Avoidance at Road Intersections in the Presence of Communication Failures
This work addresses the critical problem of safe and efficient intersection crossing for autonomous vehicles relying on V2V communication, which is prone to failures.
The paper proposes a distributed algorithm for collision avoidance at road intersections that handles unknown numbers of communication failures, ensuring safety and liveness with only a slight increase in crossing delay even under highly correlated failures.
Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is a crucial component of the future autonomous driving systems since it enables improved awareness of the surrounding environment, even without extensive processing of sensory information. However, V2V communication is prone to failures and delays, so a distributed fault-tolerant approach is required for safe and efficient transportation. In this paper, we focus on the intersection crossing (IC) problem with autonomous vehicles that cooperate via V2V communications, and propose a novel distributed IC algorithm that can handle an unknown number of communication failures. Our analysis shows that both safety and liveness requirements are satisfied in all realistic situations. We also found, based on a real data set, that the crossing delay is only slightly increased even in the presence of highly correlated failures.