A system and method of intelligent navigation with collision avoidance for
a vehicle is provided. The system includes a global positioning system
and a vehicle navigation means in communication with the global
positioning system. The system also includes a centrally located
processor in communication with the navigation means, and an information
database associated with the controller, for identifying a location of a
first vehicle and a second vehicle. The system further includes an alert
means for transmitting an alert message to the vehicle operator regarding
a collision with a second vehicle. The method includes the steps of
determining a geographic location of a first vehicle and a second vehicle
within an environment using the global positioning system on the first
vehicle and the global positioning system on the second vehicle, and
modeling a collision avoidance domain of the environment of the first
vehicle as a discrete state space Markov Decision Process. The
methodology scales down the model of the collision avoidance domain, and
determines an optimal value function and control policy that solves the
scaled down collision avoidance domain. The methodology extracts a basis
function from the optimal value function, scales up the extracted basis
function to represent the unscaled domain, and determines an approximate
solution to the control policy by solving the rescaled domain using the
scaled up basis function. The methodology further uses the solution to
determine if the second vehicle may collide with the first vehicle and
transmits a message to the user notification device.