This study presents an integrated hybrid solution to mandatory lane changing problem
to deal with accident avoidance by choosing a safe gap in highway driving. To manage
this, a comprehensive treatment to a lane change active safety design is proposed from
dynamics, control, and decision making aspects.
My effort first goes on driver behaviors and relating human reasoning of threat in
driving for modeling a decision making strategy. It consists of two main parts; threat assessment
in traffic participants, (TV s) states, and decision making. The first part utilizes
an complementary threat assessment of TV s, relative to the subject vehicle, SV , by evaluating
the traffic quantities. Then I propose a decision strategy, which is based on Markov
decision processes (MDPs) that abstract the traffic environment with a set of actions, transition
probabilities, and corresponding utility rewards. Further, the interactions of the TV s
are employed to set up a real traffic condition by using game theoretic approach. The question
to be addressed here is that how an autonomous vehicle optimally interacts with the
surrounding vehicles for a gap selection so that more effective performance of the overall
traffic flow can be captured. Finding a safe gap is performed via maximizing an objective
function among several candidates. A future prediction engine thus is embedded in the
design, which simulates and seeks for a solution such that the objective function is maximized
at each time step over a horizon. The combined system therefore forms a predictive
fuzzy Markov game (FMG) since it is to perform a predictive interactive driving strategy
to avoid accidents for a given traffic environment. I show the effect of interactions in decision
making process by proposing both cooperative and non-cooperative Markov game
strategies for enhanced traffic safety and mobility. This level is called the higher level
controller. I further focus on generating a driver controller to complement the automated
car’s safe driving. To compute this, model predictive controller (MPC) is utilized. The
success of the combined decision process and trajectory generation is evaluated with a set
of different traffic scenarios in dSPACE virtual driving environment.
Next, I consider designing an active front steering (AFS) and direct yaw moment control
(DYC) as the lower level controller that performs a lane change task with enhanced
handling performance in the presence of varying front and rear cornering stiffnesses. I propose
a new control scheme that integrates active front steering and the direct yaw moment
control to enhance the vehicle handling and stability. I obtain the nonlinear tire forces
with Pacejka model, and convert the nonlinear tire stiffnesses to parameter space to design
a linear parameter varying controller (LPV) for combined AFS and DYC to perform a
commanded lane change task. Further, the nonlinear vehicle lateral dynamics is modeled
with Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) framework. A state-feedback fuzzy H∞ controller is designed
for both stability and tracking reference. Simulation study confirms that the performance
of the proposed methods is quite satisfactory
