A Cooperative Protocol for Vehicle Merging Using Bi-dimensional Artificial Potential Fields

In recent years, platooning solutions like cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) have been deeply studied. It is common in such platooning literature to assume that the vehicles drive on the same lane (longitudinal platooning). At the same time, lateral control during merging maneuvers is commonly addressed as a path planning problem, in...

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...

A Lateral Control Solution for Cooperative Vehicle Platooning Applications

Vehicle platooning is often regarded as one of the most promising solutions for solving the road congestion issues. Experiments have successfully proven that longitudinal platooning can be safely achieved in real world applications using a platoon of several vehicles. Lateral control however, has received far less attention. The main difficulty...

Model-based Path Planning and Control for Autonomous Vehicles using Artificial Potential Fields

This report presents the results of the graduation thesis from the TU Delft, performed at the Integrated Vehicle Safety department of TNO. The goal of this graduation project is to develop a unified path planning and tracking method for autonomous vehicles in highway driving scenarios, by making use of Artificial Potential Fields (APFs).<br/><br...

Performance benchmark of state-of-the-art lateral path-following controllers

Although extensive research has been conducted to design path-following algorithms for automated vehicles, the cross comparison between different path-following controllers is still weakly-analyzed. Therefore, we benchmarked five path-following algorithms to evaluate their performance according to various disturbances like gust wind, drop of...

String-stable automated steering in cooperative driving applications

The ever-increasing road transport demand in the developing and the developed world has resulted in road-traffic networks nearing maximum capacity. Traditional approaches to this problem, such as increasing road capacity, do not offer long-term solutions. Combined with rising environmental concerns, the demand for smarter solutions has never...

Safe Interaction Between Lateral and Longitudinal Adaptive Cruise Control in Autonomous Vehicles

According to the statistics, driver error is the main reason for the road accidents: this has motivated an intensive research on intelligent vehicles equipped with automated driving technology, active safety and driver-assistance systems so as to enhance the safety of drivers, facilitate vehicle controllability and stability, and improve driving...