Fuzzy Control to Drive Car-Like Vehicles

International audienceThe reactive component of a motion control architecture (called EM) for a car-like vehicle intended to move in dynamic and partially known environments is presented in this paper. Its purpose is to generate commands for the servo-systems of the vehicle so as to follow a given nominal trajectory while reacting in real-time to unexpected events. EM is designed as a fuzzy controller. A behaviour-based approach is used to set up the fuzzy rule base: the overall behaviour of the vehicle results from the combination of several basic behaviours (trajectory following, obstacle avoidance, etc.). This approach permits an easy and incremental construction of the fuzzy rule base and also to develop and test the basic behaviours separately. EM has been implemented and tested on a real computer-controlled car equipped with sensors of limited precision and reliability. Experimental results obtained with the prototype vehicle are presented. They demonstrate the capability of EM to actually control a real vehicle and to perform trajectory following and obstacle avoidance in real outdoor environments by using simple fuzzy behaviours relying upon low-resolution sensor data

From a Competition for Self-Driving Miniature Cars to a Standardized Experimental Platform: Concept, Models, Architecture, and Evaluation

Context: Competitions for self-driving cars facilitated the development and research in the domain of autonomous vehicles towards potential solutions for the future mobility. Objective: Miniature vehicles can bridge the gap between simulation-based evaluations of algorithms relying on simplified models, and those time-consuming vehicle tests on real-scale proving grounds. Method: This article combines findings from a systematic literature review, an in-depth analysis of results and technical concepts from contestants in a competition for self-driving miniature cars, and experiences of participating in the 2013 competition for self-driving cars. Results: A simulation-based development platform for real-scale vehicles has been adapted to support the development of a self-driving miniature car. Furthermore, a standardized platform was designed and realized to enable research and experiments in the context of future mobility solutions. Conclusion: A clear separation between algorithm conceptualization and validation in a model-based simulation environment enabled efficient and riskless experiments and validation. The design of a reusable, low-cost, and energy-efficient hardware architecture utilizing a standardized software/hardware interface enables experiments, which would otherwise require resources like a large real-scale test track.Comment: 17 pages, 19 figues, 2 table

Sharing Human-Generated Observations by Integrating HMI and the Semantic Sensor Web

Current “Internet of Things” concepts point to a future where connected objects gather meaningful information about their environment and share it with other objects and people. In particular, objects embedding Human Machine Interaction (HMI), such as mobile devices and, increasingly, connected vehicles, home appliances, urban interactive infrastructures, etc., may not only be conceived as sources of sensor information, but, through interaction with their users, they can also produce highly valuable context-aware human-generated observations. We believe that the great promise offered by combining and sharing all of the different sources of information available can be realized through the integration of HMI and Semantic Sensor Web technologies. This paper presents a technological framework that harmonizes two of the most influential HMI and Sensor Web initiatives: the W3C’s Multimodal Architecture and Interfaces (MMI) and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) Sensor Web Enablement (SWE) with its semantic extension, respectively. Although the proposed framework is general enough to be applied in a variety of connected objects integrating HMI, a particular development is presented for a connected car scenario where drivers’ observations about the traffic or their environment are shared across the Semantic Sensor Web. For implementation and evaluation purposes an on-board OSGi (Open Services Gateway Initiative) architecture was built, integrating several available HMI, Sensor Web and Semantic Web technologies. A technical performance test and a conceptual validation of the scenario with potential users are reported, with results suggesting the approach is soun

Fault-Tolerance by Graceful Degradation for Car Platoons

The key advantage of autonomous car platoons are their short inter-vehicle distances that increase traffic flow and reduce fuel consumption. However, this is challenging for operational and functional safety. If a failure occurs, the affected vehicles cannot suddenly stop driving but instead should continue their operation with reduced performance until a safe state can be reached or, in the case of temporal failures, full functionality can be guaranteed again. To achieve this degradation, platoon members have to be able to compensate sensor and communication failures and have to adjust their inter-vehicle distances to ensure safety. In this work, we describe a systematic design of degradation cascades for sensor and communication failures in autonomous car platoons using the example of an autonomous model car. We describe our systematic design method, the resulting degradation modes, and formulate contracts for each degradation level. We model and test our resulting degradation controller in Simulink/Stateflow

Secure Vehicular Communication Systems: Implementation, Performance, and Research Challenges

Vehicular Communication (VC) systems are on the verge of practical deployment. Nonetheless, their security and privacy protection is one of the problems that have been addressed only recently. In order to show the feasibility of secure VC, certain implementations are required. In [1] we discuss the design of a VC security system that has emerged as a result of the European SeVeCom project. In this second paper, we discuss various issues related to the implementation and deployment aspects of secure VC systems. Moreover, we provide an outlook on open security research issues that will arise as VC systems develop from today's simple prototypes to full-fledged systems