Naoko Minobe

Applications of inter-vehicle communications to driver assistance system

This paper proposes the application of inter-vehicle communications to advanced vehicle control and safety systems (AVCSS) such as driver assistance systems, and describes some experimental results. The inter-vehicle communications is a key technology in the AVCSS, because data on neighboring vehicles that are difficult or impossible to measure with onboard equipment can be acquired over the inter-vehicle communications. The locations of neighboring vehicles are the essential data that be transmitted over the inter-vehicle communications in the driver assistance systems, much like an intersection collision prevention system. The inter-vehicle communications extends the horizon of the driver and onboard sensing systems.

Automated Vehicle Mobile Guidance System for Parking Assistance

A new concept that a vehicle, which does not have fully automated functions but has partial intelligent functions, is manually or automatically guided to an assigned destination position with a guidance system has been proposed. This paper describes the concept of the system and reports the experimental results of the guidance to a parking space with the proposed system. The experimental study has been conducted to show the feasibility of the system proposed. In the experiments, a vehicle was guided with a mobile guidance system that measures the position and the heading of a guided vehicle to instruct it the steering and the velocity to its goal. The system is featured by that a few intelligent mobile guidance systems will assist many ordinary vehicles in dedicated areas including parking lots.

Elderly Driver Assistance Systems with Cooperation between Vehicles: the Concept and Experiments

This paper proposes a new concept of elderly driver assistance systems, which performs the assistance by the cooperative driving between two vehicles, and describes some experiments with elderly drivers. The assistance consists of one vehicle driven by an elderly driver called a guest vehicle and the other driven by a assisting driver called a host vehicle, and the host vehicle assists or escorts the guest vehicle through the inter-vehicle communications. The functions of the systems installed on a single-seat electric vehicle are highly evaluated by subjects of elderly drivers in virtual streets on a test track.