Validation of trajectory planning strategies for automated driving under cooperative, urban, and interurban scenarios.

149 p.En esta Tesis se estudia, diseña e implementa una arquitectura de control para vehículos automatizados de forma dual, que permite realizar pruebas en simulación y en vehículos reales con los mínimos cambios posibles. La arquitectura descansa sobre seis módulos: adquisición de información de sensores, percepción del entorno, comunicaciones e interacción con otros agentes, decisión de maniobras, control y actuación, además de la generación de mapas en el módulo de decisión, que utiliza puntos simples para la descripción de las estructuras de la ruta (rotondas, intersecciones, tramos rectos y cambios de carril)Tecnali

Functional failure sequences in traffic accidents

This thesis examines the interactions between road users and the factors that contribute to the occurrence of traffic accidents, and discusses the implications of these interactions with regards to driver behaviour and accident prevention measures. Traffic accident data is collected on a macroscopic level by local police authorities throughout the UK. This data provides a description of accident related factors on a macroscopic level which does not allow for a complete understanding of the interaction between the various road users or the influence of errors made by active road users. Traffic accident data collected on a microscopic level analysis of real world accident data, explaining why and how an accident occurred, can further contribute to a data driven approach to provide safety measures. This data allows for a better understanding of the interaction of factors for all road users within an accident that is not possible with other data collection methods. In the first part of the thesis, a literature review presents relevant research in traffic accident analysis and accident causation research, afterwards three accident causation models used to understand behaviour and factors leading to traffic accidents are introduced. A comparison study of these accident causation coding models that classify road user error was carried out to determine a model that would be best suited to code the accident data according to the thesis aims. Latent class cluster analyses were made of two separate datasets, the UK On the Spot (OTS) in-depth accident investigation study and the STATS19 national accident database. A comparison between microscopic (in-depth) accident data and macroscopic (national) accident data was carried out. This analysis allowed for the interactions between all relevant factors for the road users involved in the accident to be grouped into specific accident segmentations based on the cluster analysis results. First, all of the cases that were collected by the OTS team between the years 2000 to 2003 were analysed. Results suggested that for single vehicle accidents males and females typically made failures related to detection and execution issues, whereas male road users made diagnosis failures with speed as a particularly important factor. In terms of the multiple vehicle accidents the interactions between the first two road users and the subsequent accident sequence were demonstrated. A cluster analysis of all two vehicle accidents in Great Britain in the year 2005 and recorded within the STATS19 accident database was carried out as a comparison to the multiple vehicle accident OTS data. This analysis demonstrated the necessity of in-depth accident causation data in interpreting accident scenarios, as the resulting accident clusters did not provide significant differences between the groups to usefully segment the crash population. Relevant human factors were not coded for these cases and the level of detail in the accident cases did not allow for a discussion of countermeasure implications. An analysis of 428 Powered Two Wheeler accidents that were collected by the OTS team between the years 2000 to 2010 was carried out. Results identified 7 specific scenarios, the main types of which identified two particular looked but did not see accidents and two types of single vehicle PTW accidents. In cases where the PTW lost control, diagnosis failures were more common, for road users other than the PTW rider, detection issues were of particular relevance. In these cases the interaction between all relevant road users was interpreted in relation to one another. The subsequent study analysed 248 Pedestrian accidents that were collected by the OTS team between the years 2000 to 2010. Results identified scenarios related to pedestrians as being in a hurry and making detection errors, impairment due to alcohol, and young children playing in the roadside. For accidents that were initiated by the other road user s behaviour pedestrians were either struck after an accident had already occurred or due to the manoeuvre that a road user was making, older pedestrians were over-represented in this accident type. This thesis concludes by discussing how (1) microscopic in-depth accident data is needed to understand accident mechanisms, (2) a data mining approach using latent class clustering can benefit the understanding of failure mechanisms, (3) accident causation analysis is necessary to understand the types of failures that road users make and (4) accident scenario development helps quantify accidents and allows for accident countermeasure implication discussion. The original contribution to knowledge is the demonstration that when relevant data is available there is a possibility to understand the interactions that are occurring between road users before the crash, that is not possible otherwise. This contribution has been demonstrated by highlighting how latent class cluster analysis combined with accident causation data allows for relevant interactions between road users to be observed. Finally implications for this work and future considerations are outlined

Model Predictive Control of Highway Emergency Maneuvering and Collision Avoidance

Autonomous emergency maneuvering (AEM) is an active safety system that automates safe maneuvers to avoid imminent collision, particularly in highway driving situations. Uncertainty about the surrounding vehicles’ decisions and also about the road condition, which has significant effects on the vehicle’s maneuverability, makes it challenging to implement the AEM strategy in practice. With the rise of vehicular networks and connected vehicles, vehicles would be able to share their perception and also intentions with other cars. Therefore, cooperative AEM can incor- porate surrounding vehicles’ decisions and perceptions in order to improve vehicles’ predictions and estimations and thereby provide better decisions for emergency maneuvering. In this thesis, we develop an adaptive, cooperative motion planning scheme for emergency maneuvering, based on the model predictive control (MPC) approach, for vehicles within a ve- hicular network. The proposed emergency maneuver planning scheme finds the best combination of longitudinal and lateral maneuvers to avoid imminent collision with surrounding vehicles and obstacles. To implement real-time MPC for the non-convex problem of collision free motion planning, safety constraints are suggested to be convexified based on the road geometry. To take advantage of vehicular communication, the surrounding vehicles’ decisions are incorporated in the prediction model to improve the motion planning results. The MPC approach is prone to loss of feasibility due to the limited prediction horizon for decision-making. For the autonomous vehicle motion planning problem, many of detected ob- stacles, which are beyond the prediction horizon, cannot be considered in the instantaneous de- cisions, and late consideration of them may cause infeasibility. The conditions that guarantee persistent feasibility of a model predictive motion planning scheme are studied in this thesis. Maintaining the system’s states in a control invariant set of the system guarantees the persis- tent feasibility of the corresponding MPC scheme. Specifically, we present two approaches to compute control invariant sets of the motion planning problem; the linearized convexified ap- proach and the brute-force approach. The resulting computed control invariant sets of these two approaches are compared with each other to demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm. Time-variation of the road condition affects the vehicle dynamics and constraints. Therefore, it necessitates the on-line identification of the road friction parameter and implementation of an adaptive emergency maneuver motion planning scheme. In this thesis, we investigate coopera- tive road condition estimation in order to improve collision avoidance performance of the AEM system. Each vehicle estimates the road condition individually, and disseminates it through the vehicular network. Accordingly, a consensus estimation algorithm fuses the individual estimates to find the maximum likelihood estimate of the road condition parameter. The performance of the proposed cooperative road condition estimation has been validated through simulations

Integrated control of vehicle chassis systems

This thesis develops a method to integrate several automotive intelligent chassis systems, such as Anti-lock Brake System, Traction Control System, Direct Yaw Control and Active Rear Wheel Steering, using evolutionary approaches. The Integrated Vehicle Control System (IVCS) combines and supervises all controllable systems in the vehicle, optimising the over all performance and minimising the energy consumption. The IVCS is able to improve the driving safety avoiding and preventing critical or unstable situations. Furthermore, if a critical or unstable configuration is reached, the integrated system should be able to recover a stable condition. The control structure proposed in this work has as main characteristics the modularity, extensibility and flexibility, fitting the requirements of a 'plug-and-play' philosophy. The investigation is divided into four steps: Vehicle Modelling, Soft-Computing, Behaviour Based Control, and Integrated Vehicle Control System. Several mathematical vehicle models, which are applied to designing and developing the control systems, are presented. MATLAB, SIMULINK and ADAMS are used as tools to implement and simulate those models. A methodology for learning and optimisation is presented. This methodology is based on Evolutionary Algorithms, integrating the Genetic Leaming Automata, CARLA and Fuzzy Logic System. The Behaviour Based Control is introduced as the main approach to designing the controllers and coordinators. The methodology previously described is used to learn the behaviours and optimise their performance, and the same technique is applied to coordinators. Several comparisons with other controllers are also carried out. From this an Integrated Vehicle Control System is designed, developed and implemented under a virtual environment. A range of manoeuvres is carried out in order to investigate its performance under diverse conditions. The leaming and optimisation method proposed in this thesis shows effective performance being able to learn all the controller and coordinator structures. The proposed approach for IVCS also demonstrates good performance, and is well suited to a 'plug-and-play' philosophy. This research provides a foundation for the implementation of the designed controllers and coordinators in a prototype vehicle.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Mobility and Aging: Older Drivers’ Visual Searching, Lane Keeping and Coordination

This thesis examined older drivers’ mobility and behaviour through comprehensive measurements of driver-vehicle-environment interaction and investigated the associations between driving behaviour and cognitive functions. Data were collected and analysed for 50 older drivers using eye tracking, GNSS tracking, and GIS. Results showed that poor selective attention, spatial ability and executive function in older drivers adversely affect lane keeping, visual search and coordination. Visual-motor coordination measure is sensitive and effective for driving assessment in older drivers

Towards a Common Software/Hardware Methodology for Future Advanced Driver Assistance Systems

The European research project DESERVE (DEvelopment platform for Safe and Efficient dRiVE, 2012-2015) had the aim of designing and developing a platform tool to cope with the continuously increasing complexity and the simultaneous need to reduce cost for future embedded Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). For this purpose, the DESERVE platform profits from cross-domain software reuse, standardization of automotive software component interfaces, and easy but safety-compliant integration of heterogeneous modules. This enables the development of a new generation of ADAS applications, which challengingly combine different functions, sensors, actuators, hardware platforms, and Human Machine Interfaces (HMI). This book presents the different results of the DESERVE project concerning the ADAS development platform, test case functions, and validation and evaluation of different approaches. The reader is invited to substantiate the content of this book with the deliverables published during the DESERVE project. Technical topics discussed in this book include:Modern ADAS development platforms;Design space exploration;Driving modelling;Video-based and Radar-based ADAS functions;HMI for ADAS;Vehicle-hardware-in-the-loop validation system

Development and Performance Evaluation of Urban Mobility Applications and Services

L'abstract è presente nell'allegato / the abstract is in the attachmen

Civil society and international governance: the role of non-state actors in the EU, Africa, Asia and Middle East

Structures and processes occurring within and between states are no longer the only – or even the most important - determinants of those political, economic and social developments and dynamics that shape the modern world. Many issues, including the environment, health, crime, drugs, migration and terrorism, can no longer be contained within national boundaries. As a result, it is not always possible to identify the loci for authority and legitimacy, and the role of governments has been called into question. \ud \ud Civil Society anf International Governance critically analyses the increasing impact of nongovernmental organisations and civil society on global and regional governance. Written from the standpoint of advocates of civil society and addressing the role of civil society in relation to the UN, the IMF, the G8 and the WTO, this volume assess the role of various non-state actors from three perspectives: theoretical aspects, civil society interaction with the European Union and civil society and regional governance outside Europe, specifically Africa, East Asia and the Middle East. It demonstrates that civil society’s role has been more complex than one defined in terms, essentially, of resistance and includes actual participation in governance as well as multi-facetted contributions to legitimising and democratising global and regional governance