A Merging Protocol for Self-Driving Vehicles

Self-driving vehicle technologies are progressing rapidly and are expected to play a significant role in the future of transportation. One of the main challenges for self-driving vehicles on public roads is the safe cooperation and collaboration among multiple vehicles using sensor-based perception and inter-vehicle communications. When self-driving vehicles try to occupy the same spatial area simultaneously, they might collide with one another, might become deadlocked, or might slam on the brakes making it uncomfortable or unsafe for passengers in a self-driving vehicle. In this paper, we study how a self-driving vehicle can safely navigate merge points, where two lanes with different priorities meet. We present a safe protocol for merge points named Autonomous Vehicle Protocol for Merge Points, where self-driving vehicles use both vehicular communications and their own perception systems for cooperating with other self-driving and/or human-driven vehicles. Our simulation results show that our traffic protocol has higher traffic throughput, compared to simple traffic protocols, while ensuring safety.