A safe driver assisted merge protocol

Abstract

We present a cooperative driving protocol that assists drivers in merging with other vehicles. We develop a modular architecture that is based upon the multiple hardware and communications platforms that must participate in this type of system. The architecture isolates the lower level functions related to the hardware from the application, and simplifies writing the merge protocol. We specify the protocol as an Extended Finite State Machine and validate it using Probabilistic Verification [1]. We demonstrate that for a wide range of hardware failures, communications failures, and unresponsive drivers, the protocol will not cause an accident. We also show that there may be situations with a very low probability, where the protocol will leave a vehicle in a state where it cannot participate in future merge operations without being reset.