Trajectory planning and following in urban environments: To reduce traffic accidents involving vulnerable road users

This thesis presents a comprehensive approach to integrating a trajectory planner and follower for autonomous vehicles (AVs) using model predictive contouring control (MPCC). The planner generates collision-free trajectories with a kinematic bicycle model, while the follower tracks them using a dynamic bicycle model with a smaller integration...

Data-driven optimal control for safe quadrotor navigation in windy environments

Creating autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles for executing complex missions poses various challenges, including safe navigation in the presence of external wind disturbances. Most current navigation methods handle external wind disturbances through real-time estimation and rejection algorithms in the control stage, but lack safety guarantees in...

Raybot: Design and control of an underwater quay wall inspection vehicle

Quay walls are important structures that keep the water in harbours and canals within their bounds, and accommodate large infrastructure like roads or ship-handling structures on top of them. Due to their importance it is critical that they do not fail or collapse. Inspections are done to prevent this, as a better knowledge of the state of quay...

Improving the PX4 software-in-the-loop multirotor UAV simulator accuracy

Recent developments have enabled the mass production of cheap, high-performance multirotors. As a result of this, the multirotor has found a large variety of different uses. Testing new algorithms using real-life flights is costly in terms of time and potentially in terms of materials in the case of a crash. Simulators have quickly gained...

A Partitioned Experience Method for Trajectory Prediction of Pedestrians

For travelling from point A to point B, autonomous vehicles generate a route between the points. During the mission, the vehicle uses a motion planning and controls algorithm to follow the planned route while avoiding static and dynamic obstacles. Motion planning algorithms generally plan over a future time horizon to smoothly follow the route...

Optimisation of Speed Trajectories to Improve the Energy Economy of Electric Vehicles

Electric vehicles are a cleaner and more efficient means of transport. However, the sub-energy-optimal acceleration and deceleration inputs of drivers result in speed trajectories that cause superfluous expenditure of the stored electrical energy in battery. Optimising the speed trajectories to minimise the consumption of stored energy is a...

Design of Automated R2C Cars for Cooperative Driving Experiments

Cooperative driving controllers are becoming interesting subjects for future research in automated driving with the increase in connectivity. Using true-scale<br/>autonomous vehicles to properly test new control algorithms can be a challenge<br/>due to three main factors: costs, safety, and space requirements. To overcome<br/>these problems,...

Model Predictive Control-based Driver Assistance System: Predicting Combined Vehicle and Driver Behaviour during Complex Truck Docking Manoeuvres

Due to the continuously increasing volume of road freight transportation, there is a need to aid or automate truck-trailer driving. Truck docking, the process of parking a truck-trailer combination at a loading dock, is one of the most difficult manoeuvres for professional drivers. In this work, we propose a Model Predictive Control (MPC)-based...

Automatic Tuning of an MPCC-based Motion Planner

Research and development of motion control in the field of autonomous driving is significantly increasing nowadays. Model predictive control (MPC) is one of the most powerful and practical tools currently available. It is important to select the parameters of the MPC, such as weights, in a way so that different control objectives can be met...

Optimization based 2D platoon control with multiple behaviors implemented through a finite state machine

With inland transportation increasing every passing day, vehicle platooning offers a good solution towards travelling more efficiently. Along with reducing traffic congestion on roads, platooning also leads to better fuel consumption among vehicles, fewer accidents, and most importantly, vehicle platoons can be made autonomous using optimization...

Optimization-based Fault Mitigation in Automated Driving

With increased developments and interest in platooning and higher levels of automation (SAE level 3+), the need for safety systems that are capable of monitoring system health and maintain safe operation in faulty scenarios is increasing. Methods for the detection, isolation and identification of faults in automated and cooperative driving is...

Practically string stable, lateral control solution for a homogeneous platoon of vehicles: A centralized vs distributed approach

The world is becoming increasingly congested due to a continuous growth of world population and overall wealth. Current road capacity limitations will lead to a significant decrease of traffic flow accompanied by a serious increase in global fuel consumption and air pollution. Ever-expanding road infrastructure is not expected to be a...

Active Safety Control for Semi-Autonomous Teleoperated Road Vehicle

The progress in technology has made vehicles safer and the quest to make them even more safe is never ending. Autonomous cars present the solution to make cars much more safer by eliminating the primary cause of road accidents, human error. However, autonomous cars tend to fail in decision making especially in complex traffic environment...

Privacy-preserving Model Predictive Control: Using Homomorphic Encryption

This thesis is focused on protecting sensitive data in optimization-based control methods. We propose a novel Privacy-preserving Model Predictive Controller (PMPC) where multiple agents are controlled by an untrusted external coordinator. By using the Paillier additively Homomorphic Encryption (HE) scheme, our PMPC allows the coordinator to...

Model Predictive Control for Automated Driving and Collision Avoidance: Design of an integrated NMPC with simultaneous lateral and longitudinal control via steering and braking

The automotive sector has seen a rapid transition towards autonomous driving with an aim to achieve SAE Level 5 vehicle. The incessant drive for innovation has resulted in modern passenger cars equipped with plethora of control technologies such as ABS, VSC, AFS via EPS assist etc. all working respectively in various critical and non-critical...

Fast MPC Solvers for Systems with Hard Real-Time Constraints

Model predictive control (MPC) is an advanced control technique that offers an elegant framework to solve a wide range of control problems (regulation, tracking, supervision, etc) and handle constraints on the plant. The control objectives and constraints are usually formulated as an optimization problem that the MPC controller has to solve ...