Azim Eskandarian, Mechanical Engineering Department Head and Nicholas & Rebecca des Champs Professor, will present, "Connected autonomous vehicles safety and mobility benefits" Friday, November 18, 2022, at 11:00 am in the Ewing Room in the University of Delaware Perkins Student Center.

Most foreseeable future driving will be a mixed environment of manual, connected, and autonomous vehicles in which safety considerations are paramount. Autonomous vehicles have the benefit of safety and comfort. Combined with connectivity through communications, Connected Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs) offer additional benefits of safety, traffic efficiency in mobility, energy savings, and reduced environmental impacts. The significant extended benefit of autonomy in traffic comes from the connectivity through communications among vehicles, vehicle and infrastructure, and vehicle and other road users (also known as V2V, V2I, and V2X.)  Among many capabilities, CAVs connectivity allows augmented cooperative perception for improved safety, automated coordinated trajectory plans, coordinated speed adaptations for enhanced traffic throughput, and reduced energy consumption. Some of these also apply to Connected Vehicles (CV) without autonomy. CVs or CAVs will have more comprehensive situational awareness in the vehicle’s vicinity for safety assurance. Driving tasks like lane changing, merging, navigating automated intersections, and various collision avoidance scenarios benefit significantly from the connectivity and the enhanced collective perception of the surrounding areas. Appropriate algorithms based on vehicular connectivity can also improve driving task decision-making and navigation plans within the traffic. This talk presents a few advanced methods and algorithms that demonstrate some benefits and challenges of CAVS through simulation and laboratory experiments.