SURROUNDING AREA MONITORING APPARATUS, SURROUNDING AREA MONITORING SYSTEM AND SURROUNDING AREA MONITORING METHOD

摘要

A surrounding area monitoring apparatus receives visual field information about a driver of a surrounding vehicle of a self vehicle, and decides whether the self vehicle is outside the visual field of the surrounding vehicle or not in accordance with the visual field information. Accordingly, it can learn the present dynamic visual field range of the driver of the surrounding vehicle actually traveling around the self vehicle, and obtain more accurate visual field range. Thus, it can appropriately give information that is really necessary and suppress giving unnecessary information.

主权项

1. A surrounding area monitoring apparatus mounted in a self vehicle to which a notification device that gives information to a driver of the self vehicle is connected, the surrounding area monitoring apparatus comprising:
a vehicle position acquirer to acquire positional information of the self vehicle; a line-of-sight acquirer to acquire line-of-sight information about the driver of the self vehicle; a visual field calculator to calculate a dynamic visual field range of the driver of the self vehicle in accordance with the line-of-sight information acquired by the line-of-sight acquirer; a communicator to transmit the positional information of the self vehicle acquired by the vehicle position acquirer and the dynamic visual field range of the driver of the self vehicle calculated by the visual field calculator to another vehicle around the self vehicle, and to receive positional information of said another vehicle and a dynamic visual field range of a driver of said another vehicle; a decider to decide whether the self vehicle is outside the dynamic visual field range of the driver of said another vehicle or not from the positional information of the self vehicle acquired by the vehicle position acquirer and from the positional information of said another vehicle and the dynamic visual field range of the driver of said another vehicle, which are received from the communicator; and a notification controller to instruct the notification device to output notification information when the decider decides that the self vehicle is outside the dynamic visual field range of the driver of said another vehicle.