scholarly journals Implementation of a Potential Field-Based Decision-Making Algorithm on Autonomous Vehicles for Driving in Complex Environments

Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (15) ◽  
pp. 3318 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Martínez ◽  
Felipe Jiménez

Autonomous driving is undergoing huge developments nowadays. It is expected that its implementation will bring many benefits. Autonomous cars must deal with tasks at different levels. Although some of them are currently solved, and perception systems provide quite an accurate and complete description of the environment, high-level decisions are hard to obtain in challenging scenarios. Moreover, they must comply with safety, reliability and predictability requirements, road user acceptance, and comfort specifications. This paper presents a path planning algorithm based on potential fields. Potential models are adjusted so that their behavior is appropriate to the environment and the dynamics of the vehicle and they can face almost any unexpected scenarios. The response of the system considers the road characteristics (e.g., maximum speed, lane line curvature, etc.) and the presence of obstacles and other users. The algorithm has been tested on an automated vehicle equipped with a GPS receiver, an inertial measurement unit and a computer vision system in real environments with satisfactory results.

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. 3783
Author(s):  
Sumbal Malik ◽  
Manzoor Ahmed Khan ◽  
Hesham El-Sayed

Sooner than expected, roads will be populated with a plethora of connected and autonomous vehicles serving diverse mobility needs. Rather than being stand-alone, vehicles will be required to cooperate and coordinate with each other, referred to as cooperative driving executing the mobility tasks properly. Cooperative driving leverages Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) communication technologies aiming to carry out cooperative functionalities: (i) cooperative sensing and (ii) cooperative maneuvering. To better equip the readers with background knowledge on the topic, we firstly provide the detailed taxonomy section describing the underlying concepts and various aspects of cooperation in cooperative driving. In this survey, we review the current solution approaches in cooperation for autonomous vehicles, based on various cooperative driving applications, i.e., smart car parking, lane change and merge, intersection management, and platooning. The role and functionality of such cooperation become more crucial in platooning use-cases, which is why we also focus on providing more details of platooning use-cases and focus on one of the challenges, electing a leader in high-level platooning. Following, we highlight a crucial range of research gaps and open challenges that need to be addressed before cooperative autonomous vehicles hit the roads. We believe that this survey will assist the researchers in better understanding vehicular cooperation, its various scenarios, solution approaches, and challenges.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 3909
Author(s):  
Changhyeon Park ◽  
Seok-Cheol Kee

In this paper, an urban-based path planning algorithm that considered multiple obstacles and road constraints in a university campus environment with an autonomous micro electric vehicle (micro-EV) is studied. Typical path planning algorithms, such as A*, particle swarm optimization (PSO), and rapidly exploring random tree* (RRT*), take a single arrival point, resulting in a lane departure situation on the high curved roads. Further, these could not consider urban-constraints to set collision-free obstacles. These problems cause dangerous obstacle collisions. Additionally, for drive stability, real-time operation should be guaranteed. Therefore, an urban-based online path planning algorithm, which is robust in terms of a curved-path with multiple obstacles, is proposed. The algorithm is constructed using two methods, A* and an artificial potential field (APF). To validate and evaluate the performance in a campus environment, autonomous driving systems, such as vehicle localization, object recognition, vehicle control, are implemented in the micro-EV. Moreover, to confirm the algorithm stability in the complex campus environment, hazard scenarios that complex obstacles can cause are constructed. These are implemented in the form of a delivery service using an autonomous driving simulator, which mimics the Chungbuk National University (CBNU) campus.


Sensors ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (17) ◽  
pp. 4703
Author(s):  
Yookhyun Yoon ◽  
Taeyeon Kim ◽  
Ho Lee ◽  
Jahnghyon Park

For driving safely and comfortably, the long-term trajectory prediction of surrounding vehicles is essential for autonomous vehicles. For handling the uncertain nature of trajectory prediction, deep-learning-based approaches have been proposed previously. An on-road vehicle must obey road geometry, i.e., it should run within the constraint of the road shape. Herein, we present a novel road-aware trajectory prediction method which leverages the use of high-definition maps with a deep learning network. We developed a data-efficient learning framework for the trajectory prediction network in the curvilinear coordinate system of the road and a lane assignment for the surrounding vehicles. Then, we proposed a novel output-constrained sequence-to-sequence trajectory prediction network to incorporate the structural constraints of the road. Our method uses these structural constraints as prior knowledge for the prediction network. It is not only used as an input to the trajectory prediction network, but is also included in the constrained loss function of the maneuver recognition network. Accordingly, the proposed method can predict a feasible and realistic intention of the driver and trajectory. Our method has been evaluated using a real traffic dataset, and the results thus obtained show that it is data-efficient and can predict reasonable trajectories at merging sections.


Author(s):  
Irfan Khan ◽  
Stefano Feraco ◽  
Angelo Bonfitto ◽  
Nicola Amati

Abstract This paper presents a controller dedicated to the lateral and longitudinal vehicle dynamics control for autonomous driving. The proposed strategy exploits a Model Predictive Control strategy to perform lateral guidance and speed regulation. To this end, the algorithm controls the steering angle and the throttle and brake pedals for minimizing the vehicle’s lateral deviation and relative yaw angle with respect to the reference trajectory, while the vehicle speed is controlled to drive at the maximum acceptable longitudinal speed considering the adherence and legal speed limits. The technique exploits data computed by a simulated camera mounted on the top of the vehicle while moving in different driving scenarios. The longitudinal control strategy is based on a reference speed generator, which computes the maximum speed considering the road geometry and lateral motion of the vehicle at the same time. The proposed controller is tested in highway, interurban and urban driving scenarios to check the performance of the proposed method in different driving environments.


Author(s):  
Francesco Biral ◽  
Enrico Bertolazzi ◽  
Daniele Bortoluzzi ◽  
Paolo Bosetti

In the last years a great effort has been devoted to the development of autonomous vehicles able to drive in a high range of speeds in semi-structured and unstructured environments. This article presents and discusses the software framework for Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) and Software-In-the-Loop (SIL) analysis that has been designed for developing and testing of control laws and mission functionalities of semi-autonomous and autonomous vehicles. The ultimate goal of this project is to develop a robotic system, named RUMBy, able to autonomously plan and execute accurate optimal manoeuvres both in normal and in critical driving situations and to be used as a test platform for advanced decision and autonomous driving algorithms. RUMBy’s hardware is a 1:6 scale gasoline engine R/C car with onboard telemetry and control systems. RUMBy’s software consists of three main modules: the manager module that coordinates the other modules and take high level decision; the motion planner module which is based on a Nonlinear Receding Horizon Control (NRHC) algorithm; the actuation module that produces the driving command for the vehicle. The article describes the details of RUMBy architecture and discusses its modular configuration that easily allows HIL and SIL tests.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jörg Fickenscher ◽  
Sandra Schmidt ◽  
Frank Hannig ◽  
Mohamed Bouzouraa ◽  
Jürgen Teich

The sector of autonomous driving gains more and more importance for the car makers. A key enabler of such systems is the planning of the path the vehicle should take, but it can be very computationally burdensome finding a good one. Here, new architectures in ECU are required, such as GPU, because standard processors struggle to provide enough computing power. In this work, we present a novel parallelization of a path planning algorithm. We show how many paths can be reasonably planned under real-time requirements and how they can be rated. As an evaluation platform, an Nvidia Jetson board equipped with a Tegra K1 SoC was used, whose GPU is also employed in the zFAS ECU of the AUDI AG.


2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (6) ◽  
pp. 660-670 ◽  
Author(s):  
Udara Eshan Manawadu ◽  
◽  
Masaaki Ishikawa ◽  
Mitsuhiro Kamezaki ◽  
Shigeki Sugano ◽  
...  

<div class=""abs_img""><img src=""[disp_template_path]/JRM/abst-image/00270006/08.jpg"" width=""300"" /> Driving simulator</div>Intelligent passenger vehicles with autonomous capabilities will be commonplace on our roads in the near future. These vehicles will reshape the existing relationship between the driver and vehicle. Therefore, to create a new type of rewarding relationship, it is important to analyze when drivers prefer autonomous vehicles to manually-driven (conventional) vehicles. This paper documents a driving simulator-based study conducted to identify the preferences and individual driving experiences of novice and experienced drivers of autonomous and conventional vehicles under different traffic and road conditions. We first developed a simplified driving simulator that could connect to different driver-vehicle interfaces (DVI). We then created virtual environments consisting of scenarios and events that drivers encounter in real-world driving, and we implemented fully autonomous driving. We then conducted experiments to clarify how the autonomous driving experience differed for the two groups. The results showed that experienced drivers opt for conventional driving overall, mainly due to the flexibility and driving pleasure it offers, while novices tend to prefer autonomous driving due to its inherent ease and safety. A further analysis indicated that drivers preferred to use both autonomous and conventional driving methods interchangeably, depending on the road and traffic conditions.


2017 ◽  
Vol 2017 ◽  
pp. 1-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
German Gramajo ◽  
Praveen Shankar

A path planning strategy for a search and coverage mission for a small UAV that maximizes the area covered based on stored energy and maneuverability constraints is presented. The proposed formulation has a high level of autonomy, without requiring an exact choice of optimization parameters, and is appropriate for real-time implementation. The computed trajectory maximizes spatial coverage while closely satisfying terminal constraints on the position of the vehicle and minimizing the time of flight. Comparisons of this formulation to a path planning algorithm based on those with time constraint show equivalent coverage performance but improvement in prediction of overall mission duration and accuracy of the terminal position of the vehicle.


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