Safety maintenance and effectiveness enhancement for highway on-ramp merging in autonomous driving with V2X-enabled cooperative perception

Vehicle-to-everything communications bring new possibilities to autonomous driving, as it helps vehicles to obtain more information of surrounding and extend perception range. Formal safety methods in ADAS application represented by Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS) focuses on avoiding accidents with information about nearby vehicles captured by vehicle sensors. In recent, negotiated-based right-of-way assignment strategy (NRAS) began to make a trade-off between safety and efficiency. However, how to maximumly utilize traffic resources remains a challenge. To address the problem, we propose V2X-enabled cooperative perception merging strategy, based on an important application where a vehicle merges into highway from on-ramp. The new strategy takes the advantage of V2X technology and analysis on autonomous vehicles (AVs) and human drivers combined traffic flow. Both theoretical analysis and experimental results shows that, new strategy can improve the traffic flow with no accidents.