How Roadside Units Enhance Intersection Safety? Cooperative Autonomous Driving System Design and A Proof of Concept

Abstract

Intersections remain one of the most hazardous locations in urban road networks, where heterogeneous traffic participants and limited visibility frequently lead to severe traffic conflicts. In this paper, a vehicle-to-infrastructure-to-vehicle (V2I2V) cooperative system is proposed for improving road safety and traffic efficiency by using digital twins (DTs) deployed on roadside units (RSUs) to eliminate blind spots and centrally coordinate connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) in smart intersections. The proposed system integrates cloud-based global DTs for macroscopic guidance and RSU-based local DTs for real-time operations. Within this architecture, a hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) framework combines offline pre-training with online fine-tuning to achieve robust cooperative control. Experimental results show that the proposed system achieves substantial improvements in safety and efficiency in simulation experiments and real-world proof-of-concept (PoC) trials. In simulations, our system ensures high safety, efficiency, and smoothness under realistic communications and traffic constraints. In PoC trials, the RSU-centric control loop achieves a decision-making latency of approximately 42 ms and maintains a safe stopping distance of 8.5 m for pedestrians, while also shortening stop duration and overall traversal time. These results indicate that the proposed system provides robust and scalable performance at smart intersections.