Minimum Safety Distances for Emergency Braking Maneuvers in Car-Following Applications

Author(s):  
Devin Schafer ◽  
Pingen Chen

Abstract Platooning/car following has been considered as a promising approach for improving vehicle efficiency due to the reduction of aerodynamic force when closely following a pilot vehicle. However, safety is a major concern in the close car platooning/following. This paper investigates the minimum inter-vehicle distances required for a passenger vehicle to safely travel behind a heavy-duty truck with three different types of emergency maneuvers. The three emergency maneuvers considered are braking only, steering only, and braking then steering, where steering refers to a single lane change maneuver. Numerical analysis is conducted for deriving the clearance space in the braking only scenario. In addition, simulations are conducted in MATLAB/Simulink, using a bicycle model for the vehicle dynamics, to examine the minimum safe following distance for the other two scenarios. The simulation results show that, for initial vehicle speeds greater than 8 m/s, a lane change maneuver requires the shortest safety distance. Braking followed by lane changing usually requires the largest minimum safety distance.

Author(s):  
Li Zhao ◽  
Laurence Rilett ◽  
Mm Shakiul Haque

This paper develops a methodology for simultaneously modeling lane-changing and car-following behavior of automated vehicles on freeways. Naturalistic driving data from the Safety Pilot Model Deployment (SPMD) program are used. First, a framework to process the SPMD data is proposed using various data analytics techniques including data fusion, data mining, and machine learning. Second, pairs of automated host vehicle and their corresponding front vehicle are identified along with their lane-change and car-following relationship data. Using these data, a lane-changing-based car-following (LCCF) model, which explicitly considers lane-change and car-following behavior simultaneously, is developed. The LCCF model is based on Gaussian-mixture-based hidden Markov model theory and is disaggregated into two processes: LCCF association and LCCF dissociation. These categories are based on the result of the lane change. The overall goal is to predict a driver’s lane-change intention using the LCCF model. Results show that the model can predict the lane-change event in the order of 0.6 to 1.3 s before the moment of the vehicle body across the lane boundary. In addition, the execution times of lane-change maneuvers average between 0.55 and 0.86 s. The LCCF model allows the intention time and execution time of driver’s lane-change behavior to be forecast, which will help to develop better advanced driver assistance systems for vehicle controls with respect to lane-change and car-following warning functions.


Author(s):  
Armin Norouzi ◽  
Milad Masoumi ◽  
Ali Barari ◽  
Saina Farrokhpour Sani

In this paper, a novel Lyapunov-based robust controller by using meta-heuristic optimization algorithm has been proposed for lateral control of an autonomous vehicle. In the first step, double lane change path has been designed using a fifth-degree polynomial (quantic) function and dynamic constraints. A lane changing path planning method has been used to design the double lane change manoeuvre. In the next step, position and orientation errors have been extracted based on the two-degree-of-freedom vehicle bicycle model. A combination of sliding mode and backstepping controllers has been used to control the steering in this paper. Overall stability of the combined controller has been analytically proved by defining a Lyapunov function and based on Lyapunov stability theorem. The proposed controller includes some constant parameters which have effects on controller performance; therefore, particle swarm optimization algorithm has been used for finding optimum values of these parameters. The comparing result of the proposed controller with backstepping controller illustrated the better performance of the proposed controller, especially in the low road frictions. Simulation of designed controllers has been conducted by linking CarSim software with Matlab/Simulink which provides a nonlinear full vehicle model. The simulation was performed for manoeuvres with different durations and road frictions. The proposed controller has outperformed the backstepping controller, especially in low frictions.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (19) ◽  
pp. 4199 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kai Gao ◽  
Di Yan ◽  
Fan Yang ◽  
Jin Xie ◽  
Li Liu ◽  
...  

Car-following is an essential trajectory control strategy for the autonomous vehicle, which not only improves traffic efficiency, but also reduces fuel consumption and emissions. However, the prediction of lane change intentions in adjacent lanes is problematic, and will significantly affect the car-following control of the autonomous vehicle, especially when the vehicle changing lanes is only a connected unintelligent vehicle without expensive and accurate sensors. Autonomous vehicles suffer from adjacent vehicles’ abrupt lane changes, which may reduce ride comfort and increase energy consumption, and even lead to a collision. A machine learning-based lane change intention prediction and real time autonomous vehicle controller is proposed to respond to this problem. First, an interval-based support vector machine is designed to predict the vehicles’ lane change intention utilizing limited low-level vehicle status through vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Then, a conditional artificial potential field method is used to design the car-following controller by incorporating the lane-change intentions of the vehicle. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method can estimate a vehicle’s lane change intention more accurately. The autonomous vehicle avoids collisions with a lane-changing connected unintelligent vehicle with reliable safety and favorable dynamic performance.


Author(s):  
Yangyang Wang ◽  
Hangyun Deng ◽  
Guangda Chen

Automatic lane change is one of the most important highway operations. It seriously affects traffic efficiency and safety. It is also an important driving technology for automatic driving. To achieve the best automatic lane-change control, it is necessary to achieve the control from the perspective of multi-objective evaluation. In this paper, to make it applicable for a hybrid condition of car following and lane change, the traditional car-following model is modified by regarding the longitudinal motion during the lane-changing process as a transition of the car-following behavior in the two lanes before and after a certain lane-change behavior. A hyperbolic tangent transition function is introduced to connect the model to achieve a smooth transition of the model output. Then, the discretionary lane-change decision process of highway autonomous vehicles is modeled into a two-vehicle game model, and a comprehensive loss function concerning safety, efficiency, and ride comfort is proposed for the evaluation of the strategies. The optimal strategy is obtained by minimizing the expectation of losses. Finally, to verify the performance of the proposed new model, simulations of different car-following and lane-changing models are carried out, which is for multi-target simulation conditions. The results of the simulation show that the new model exhibits higher traffic efficiency, better homogeneity, and stability.


Actuators ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (8) ◽  
pp. 173
Author(s):  
Hongbo Wang ◽  
Shihan Xu ◽  
Longze Deng

Traffic accidents are often caused by improper lane changes. Although the safety of lane-changing has attracted extensive attention in the vehicle and traffic fields, there are few studies considering the lateral comfort of vehicle users in lane-changing decision-making. Lane-changing decision-making by single-step dynamic game with incomplete information and path planning based on Bézier curve are proposed in this paper to coordinate vehicle lane-changing performance from safety payoff, velocity payoff, and comfort payoff. First, the lane-changing safety distance which is improved by collecting lane-changing data through simulated driving, and lane-changing time obtained by Bézier curve path planning are introduced into the game payoff, so that the selection of the lane-changing start time considers the vehicle safety, power performance and passenger comfort of the lane-changing process. Second, the lane-changing path without collision to the forward vehicle is obtained through the constrained Bézier curve, and the Bézier curve is further constrained to obtain a smoother lane-changing path. The path tracking sliding mode controller of front wheel angle compensation by radical basis function neural network is designed. Finally, the model in the loop simulation and the hardware in the loop experiment are carried out to verify the advantages of the proposed method. The results of three lane-changing conditions designed in the hardware in the loop experiment show that the vehicle safety, power performance, and passenger comfort of the vehicle controlled by the proposed method are better than that of human drivers in discretionary lane change and mandatory lane change scenarios.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 1523
Author(s):  
Nikita Smirnov ◽  
Yuzhou Liu ◽  
Aso Validi ◽  
Walter Morales-Alvarez ◽  
Cristina Olaverri-Monreal

Autonomous vehicles are expected to display human-like behavior, at least to the extent that their decisions can be intuitively understood by other road users. If this is not the case, the coexistence of manual and autonomous vehicles in a mixed environment might affect road user interactions negatively and might jeopardize road safety. To this end, it is highly important to design algorithms that are capable of analyzing human decision-making processes and of reproducing them. In this context, lane-change maneuvers have been studied extensively. However, not all potential scenarios have been considered, since most works have focused on highway rather than urban scenarios. We contribute to the field of research by investigating a particular urban traffic scenario in which an autonomous vehicle needs to determine the level of cooperation of the vehicles in the adjacent lane in order to proceed with a lane change. To this end, we present a game theory-based decision-making model for lane changing in congested urban intersections. The model takes as input driving-related parameters related to vehicles in the intersection before they come to a complete stop. We validated the model by relying on the Co-AutoSim simulator. We compared the prediction model outcomes with actual participant decisions, i.e., whether they allowed the autonomous vehicle to drive in front of them. The results are promising, with the prediction accuracy being 100% in all of the cases in which the participants allowed the lane change and 83.3% in the other cases. The false predictions were due to delays in resuming driving after the traffic light turned green.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2018 ◽  
pp. 1-5
Author(s):  
Tao Wang ◽  
Jing Zhang ◽  
Guangyao Li ◽  
Keyu Xu ◽  
Shubin Li

In the traditional optimal velocity model, safe distance is usually a constant, which, however, is not representative of actual traffic conditions. This paper attempts to study the impact of dynamic safety distance on vehicular stream through a car-following model. Firstly, a new car-following model is proposed, in which the traditional safety distance is replaced by a dynamic term. Then, the phase diagram in the headway, speed, and sensitivity spaces is given to illustrate the impact of a variable safe distance on traffic flow. Finally, numerical methods are conducted to examine the performance of the proposed model with regard to two aspects: compared with the optimal velocity model, the new model can suppress traffic congestion effectively and, for different safety distances, the dynamic safety distance can improve the stability of vehicular stream. Simulation results suggest that the new model is able to enhance traffic flow stability.


2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (3) ◽  
pp. 276-286 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yihuan Zhang ◽  
Qin Lin ◽  
Jun Wang ◽  
Sicco Verwer ◽  
John M. Dolan

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