Adaptive Cruise Control Utilizing Noisy Multi-Leader Measurements: A Learning-Based Approach

A substantial number of vehicles nowadays are equipped with adaptive cruise control (ACC), which adjusts the vehicle speed automatically. However, experiments have found that commercial ACC systems which only detect the direct leader amplify the propagating disturbances in the platoon. This can cause severe traffic congestion when the number...

A General Hierarchical Control System to Model ACC Systems: An Empirical Study

Urged by a close future perspective of a traffic flow made of a mix of human-driven vehicles and automated vehicles (AVs), research has recently focused on studying the traffic flow characteristics of Adaptive Cruise Controls (ACCs), the most typical AV. However, in most works, the ACC system is studied under a simplifying and unrealistic...

A Coalitional MPC Approach to Control of Collaborative Vehicle Platoons

This work presents a coalitional model predictive controller for collaborative vehicle platoons. The overall system is modeled as a string of locally controlled vehicles that can share data through a wireless communication network. The vehicles can dynamically form disjoint groups that coordinate their actions, i.e., the so-called coalitions....

Multi-leader Adaptive Cruise Control Systems considering Sensor Measurement Uncertainties based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) relieves human drivers’ tasks by taking over the control of the throttle and braking of the vehicles automatically. However, it has been demonstrated in many empirical studies that current production ACC systems fail to guarantee string stability. It is believed that if vehicles can take the longitudinal dynamics...

Proposed Empirical Approach to Measuring Traffic String Stability

This study originated with the intent of qualifying traffic string stability from empirical observations. A new responsiveness angle measure was developed to assess driver instincts under vehicle-following conditions. In this measure, the degree of the follower vehicle's attention towards its leader vehicle's actions is quantified. 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...

Semi-constant Spacing Policy for Leader-Predecessor-Follower Platoon Control via Delayed Measurements Synchronization

Constant spacing-based platooning systems cannot guarantee string stability if platoon members only use the preceding vehicle's information. To meet string stability specification, leader-predecessor-follower (LPF) platooning systems are proposed to incorporate the information of both the preceding vehicle and the platoon leader into the...

Traffic Flow on a Ring with a Single Autonomous Vehicle: An Interconnected Stability Perspective

In recent years, field experiments have been performed on ring roadways with human-driven vehicles or with a mix of human-driven and autonomous vehicles. While these experiments demonstrate the potential for controlling traffic flows by a small number of autonomous vehicles, the theoretical framework about such a possibility is to a large...

Stability Analysis of Mixed Traffic Flow using Car-Following Models on Trajectory Data

There is an increase in the need to understand traffic flow behavior through multiple fronts, especially in developing countries like India, where a high degree of heterogeneity, non-lane-discipline, and non-compliance to traffic rules prevail in the road sections. As a result, it can impact the stability of the traffic stream. Four car...

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...

Analysis and Control of Mixed Traffic Flow on a Ring with a Single Autonomous Vehicle

This thesis provides a theoretical framework for the arise of stop-and-go waves in platoons of Human-driven Vehicles (HVs) on a ring road topology. Possibilities and limitations for traffic control and suppression of such waves via a single Autonomous Vehicle (AV) are considered. Being HVs prone to show string instability, i.e. a type of...

Event-Triggered Control for Vehicle Platooning: Application to heterogeneous platoons

This thesis covers the implementation of Event-Triggering Control (ETC) on Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC). CACC has the potential to increase road capacity, by having safe vehicle following with small intervehicle distance (less than 1 second), to increase traffic flow by eliminating shockwave effects, such that string-stable...

Infrastructure assisted adaptive driving to stabilise heterogeneous vehicle strings

Literature has shown potentials of Connected/Cooperative Automated Vehicles (CAVs) in improving highway operations, especially on roadway capacity and flow stability. However, benefits were also shown to be negligible at low market penetration rates. This work develops a novel adaptive driving strategy for CAVs to stabilise heterogeneous...

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...

An adaptive approach to cooperative longitudinal platooning of heterogeneous vehicles with communication losses

Despite the progresses in Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC), a crucial limitation of the state-of-the-art of this control scheme is that the string stability of the platoon can be proven only when the vehicles in the platoon have identical driveline dynamics (homogeneous platoons). In this paper, we present a novel control strategy...