More than 44% of all automotive crashes occur in intersections. These incidents in intersections result in more than 8,500 fatalities and approximately 1 million injuries each year in USA. It is also established that roundabouts are safer than junctions. According to a USDOT study, when compared with the junctions they replaced, roundabouts have 40% fewer vehicle collisions, 80% fewer injuries and 90% fewer serious injuries and fatalities.
In earlier work, we have proposed a family of vehicular network protocols, which use Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC) and Wireless Access in Vehicular Environment (WAVE) technologies to coordinate a vehicle's movement through intersections. We have shown that vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications can be used to avoid collisions at the intersection and also significantly decrease the trip delays introduced by traffic lights and stop signs. In this paper, we investigate the use of our proposed V2V-intersection protocols for autonomous driving at roundabouts. We have extended our hybrid emulator-simulator called AutoSim to implement realistic map and mobility models to study traffic flow at roundabouts and have implemented our V2V-intersection protocols on roundabouts. Using a simulated environment, we quantify the benefits of our proposed intersection protocols in terms of safety and throughput enhancements while negotiating roundabouts.
