Visible light communication-based traffic control of autonomous vehicles at multi-lane roundabouts
Maged Fakirah, Supeng Leng, Xiaosha Chen, Jihua Zhou
Abstract
Abstract Roundabouts are a form of circular intersections adopted to secure road safety of the vehicles. However, collisions are not prevented entirely even when using roundabouts, since accidents may happen at specific intersection points leading to either traffic congestions or serious accidents. In this paper, a visible light communication (VLC)-based collision avoidance scheme is proposed to coordinate autonomous vehicles in traversing roundabouts, which has high effectiveness in vehicular environments. In particular, roadside units (RSUs) are deployed at the roundabout entrances to coordinate the vehicles in a vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) mode. By adopting the synchronization approach, vehicles can pass the roundabout simultaneously if their paths are concurrent with each other. Otherwise, vehicles are prioritized according to their arrival time and reasonable decelerations are applied to waive potential conflicts. Simulation results showed that our proposed approach satisfies the roundabout traffic demands in terms of concurrency, safety, and time utilization as vehicles are strongly recommended to decelerate in only 22% of the cases studied in different scenarios.