Car2Car Sicherheitsfunktionen - High safety, low cost

The European Union announces the objective to halve the number of road casualties within the next decade. The automotive industry meets this challenge as part of the "vision zero", which is the aim of avoiding any accident victims, in a variety of tasks in the research and development area. Active safety systems are one part, with increasing importance, of the measures to reduce the risks of injury. Through the use of new sensor technologies the major portion of the innovation strengths of car safety can be realized. The V2V-Communication is a completely new sensor system. By the means of high dynamic VANETs vehicles obtain the capability to share data with surrounding traffic participants. Through this sensor, ignoring several restrictions, there is the opportunity to transmit unlimited amounts of information concerning the current vehicle state of driving and potentially dangerous road conditions, if several restrictions are neglected. Within the research area of V2V communications Volkswagen claims a leading role. Studies of the US DoT acknowledge 76% of the accidents in the USA might be addressed by the V2V-Communication. Research projects like Safety Pilot from Intelligent Transportation Systems Joint Program Office emphasize the importance of safety issues for the design and evaluation of V2V systems with a probable influence on National Highway Safety Traffic Administration (NHTSA) regulation processes. If the assumption, that V2V has a high crash avoidance potential, is correct, the following questions arise: "Which safety applications are capable for V2V implementation?", "What are the resulting requirements and standards relevant to communication technology?", "Which opportunities considering low cost demands for small vehicle classes exist?" This article answers this series of questions and derives requirements using an integrated multilevel warning strategy. 'Thereby reveals, that specific applications and escalation steps utilizing active braking and steering, require high quality and performance standards of the communication sensor. An approach to fuse V2V data with an additional environmental sensor (radar, camera, etc.) is proposed to resolve the conflict between high functional requirements and resulting hardware costs. In fact, through this approach the realization of V2V safety applications with considerably lower hardware requirements is feasible. A concrete use case, an application for rear-end collision avoidance, is applied for a vivid illustration of abstract requirements. At this point in time the main target is to investigate the potential of a sensor fusion approach and the essential development areas. Thereby aspects as democratization of safety applications, function-oriented development and cost sensitive functional specification are taken into consideration. This is summarized in the thesis title: "Car2Car Sicherherheitsfunktionen - High safety low cost" which is thoroughly discussed from the functional development point of view.