Situational Awareness in Intelligent Vehicles

Cooperative intelligent vehicle systems constitute a promising way to improving traffic throughput, safety and comfort, and thus are the focus of intensive research and development. The vehicles implement more and more complex onboard functionalities, which interact with each other and with their surroundings, including other vehicles and roadside information infrastructure. In order for a functionality “do the right thing” it should have a sufficiently complete and certain interpretation of the surrounding world (i.e., relevant part of the road infrastructure, the surrounding vehicles, the ego-vehicle itself, etc.). Due to the ever-existing limitations of the sensing, the complexity of the data interpretation and the inherent uncertainty of the world “out there”, creating this representation poses major challenges and has far reaching consequences concerning how onboard functionalities should be built. The situational awareness term covers an overarching research field, which addresses this understanding process from different angles. It attempts the conceptualization of the problem domain, it relates sensory data processing and data fusion with the understanding process, and it investigates the role of humans in the related processes and even gives architectural guidelines for system design.

First a brief overview is given about the established models for situational awareness emphasizing the specialties of the intelligent vehicle systems. Then the representation problem is covered in details because the representation has strong influence both on the sensing, data interpretation, control and architectural aspect. Finally the control and architectural aspects are covered addressing the design for dependability.