Abstract
Cooperative perception through connectivity offers additional safety to autonomous driving by extending the field of view of the vehicles beyond their sensors. Critical safety information is passed among vehicles via wireless communications; therefore, communication among the vehicles in the system should be perfect and delay-free. In this article, an analytical study is proposed to show the effect of communication delays in a critical and emergency situation, where relying on the lead vehicle is so much crucial for an ego vehicle to avoid danger without any delay in sharing the dynamic information of on-road pedestrian or any such vulnerable road users. A simple and effective control algorithm is utilized based on distance modeling in a cooperative driving environment to control the vehicle’s longitudinal dynamics. A detailed simulation study using a dynamic model for both ego and lead vehicles, as well as a pedestrian on a hazardous on-road scenario, is presented to illustrate the effect of communication delays in autonomous driving.