Robust Handling of Diffuse Hazard in Country Road Traffic

Abstract—Traffic hazards can be present everywhere on a route, especially on roads without access limitations. Many severe accidents occur on country roads because of the combination of lack of access restrictions with relatively high travel speed. To prevent a hazard to lead to an accident, timely information is needed, which in most cases depends on sensor range, which, unfortunately, is limited both by the devices and the environment. Robust approaches – being ready for the worst case – lead to a significant loss in travel speed, while probabilistic approaches may have a price in terms of safety. In this paper, we propose a switching strategy mainly based on sensor range and topological information. Far from highhazard regions, e.g. road crossings, only sensor range is used to limit the maximum speed, so that, in an unexpected case, an emergency braking with limited risk could be possible. Near to high-hazard regions, an active hazard search is performed and the travel speed adapted accordingly. The proposed control strategy is evaluated in terms of time cost at the example of T-crossings on country roads using recorded measurements.