Applied Sciences (Dec 2020)
Evaluating the Impact of Drone Signaling in Crosswalk Scenario
Abstract
The characteristic pillars of a city are its economy, its mobility, its environment, its inhabitants, its way of life, and its organization. Since 1980, the concept of smart city generally consists of optimizing costs, organization, and the well-being of inhabitants. The idea is to develop means and solutions capable of meeting the needs of the population, while preserving resources and the environment. Owing to their little size, their flexibility, and their low cost, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are today used in a huge number of daily life applications. UAV use cases can be classified into three categories: data covering (like surveillance and event covering), data relaying (like delivery and emergency services), and data dissemination (like cartography and precise agriculture). In addition, the interest to Cooperative Intelligent Transportation Systems (C-ITS) has risen in these recent years, especially in the context of smart cities. In such systems, both drivers and traffic managers share the information and cooperate to coordinate their actions to ensure safety, traffic efficiency, and environment preservation. In this work, we aimed at introducing a UAV in a use case that is likely to happen in C-ITS. A conflict is considered involving a car and a pedestrian. A UAV observes from the top of the scene and will play the role of the situation controller, the information collector, and the assignment of the instructions to the car driver in case of a harmful situation to avoid car-pedestrian collision. To this end, we highlight interactions between the UAV and the car vehicle (U2V communication), as well as between the UAV and infrastructure (U2I communication). Hence, the benefit of using UAV is emphasized to reduce accident gravity rate, braking distance, energy consumption, and occasional visibility reduction.
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