Development and experimental validation of a semi-autonomous cooperative active safety system

In this paper, the problem of collision avoidance between two vehicles is considered, in which one vehicle is autonomous and the other one is human-driven. This problem arises in cooperative active safety systems at traffic intersections, mergings, and roundabouts, in which some vehicles are equipped with on-board communication and automatic control, while others are not capable of communicating and are human-driven. We model the human driving behavior through a hybrid automaton, whose current mode is determined by the driver's decisions, and solve the problem as a safety control problem for hybrid systems with imperfect state information. The experimental results demonstrate that our solution is substantially less conservative than solutions employing worst-case design.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (NSF CAREER Award Number CNS-0642719