This paper presents a data-driven Model Predictive Control (MPC) for energy-efficient urban road driving for connected, automated vehicles. The proposed MPC aims to minimize total energy consumption by controlling the vehicle's longitudinal motion on roads with traffic lights and front vehicles. Its terminal cost function and terminal constraints are learned from data, which consists of the closed-loop state and input trajectories. The terminal cost function represents the remaining energy-to-spend starting from a given terminal state. The terminal constraints are designed to ensure that the controlled vehicle timely crosses the upcoming traffic light, adheres to traffic laws, and accounts for the front vehicles. We validate the effectiveness of our method through both simulations and vehicle-in-the-loop experiments, demonstrating 19% improvement in average energy efficiency compared to conventional approaches that involve solving a long-horizon optimal control problem for speed planning and employing a separate controller for speed tracking.
An automated vehicle refers to a vehicle that can achieve a safe movement on a roadway facility without the influence of a human driver. With emerging trend of the connected vehicle concept over the past decade, numerous state-of-the-art applications focusing on automated vehicle-based intersection control have been proposed. The main purpose of this study is to estimate and evaluate impact of designated lanes for automated vehicles and recommend some viable lane configuration scenarios for signalized urban arterials. The automated driving was simulated in PTV Vissim using trajectory-driven co…
This paper presents an online-capable controller for the energy management system of a parallel hybrid electric vehicle based on model predictive control. Its task is to minimize the vehicle's fuel consumption along a predicted driving mission by calculating the distribution of the driver's power request between the electrical and the combustive part of the powertrain, and by choosing the driving mode, which depends on the vehicle's clutch state. The inclusion of the clutch state in a model predictive control structure is not trivial because the underlying optimization problem becomes a mixed-…
In this paper, a human-machine adaptive shared control method is proposed for automated vehicles (AVs) under automation performance degradation. First, a novel risk assessment module is proposed to monitor driving behavior and evaluate automation performance degradation for AVs. Then, an adaptive control authority allocation module is developed. In the event of any performance degradation detection, the allocated control authority of the automation system is decreased based on the assessed risk to reduce the potential risk of vehicle motion. Consequently, the control authority allocated to the…
Lane-change maneuver has always been a challenging task for both manual and autonomous driving, especially in an urban setting. In particular, the uncertainty in predicting the behavior of other vehicles on the road leads to indecisive actions while changing lanes, which, might result in traffic congestion and cause safety concerns. This paper analyzes the factors related to uncertainty such as speed range change and lane change so as to design a predictive Markov decision process for lane-change maneuver in the urban setting. A hidden Markov model is developed for modeling uncertainties of su…
We propose a stochastic reachability computation framework for occupancy prediction in automated driving by directly solving the underlying transport partial differential equation governing the advection of the closed-loop joint density functions. The resulting nonparametric gridless computation is based on integration along the characteristic curves, and allows online computation of the time-varying collision probabilities. Numerical simulations highlight the scope the proposed method.
In this paper, we develop an optimal weight adaptation strategy of model predictive control (MPC) for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) in mixed traffic. We model the interaction between a CAV and a human-driven vehicle (HDV) as a simultaneous game and formulate a game-theoretic MPC problem to find a Nash equilibrium of the game. In the MPC problem, the weights in the HDV's objective function can be learned online using moving horizon inverse reinforcement learning. Using Bayesian optimization, we propose a strategy to optimally adapt the weights in the CAV's objective function so that t…
Trajectory planning in urban automated driving is challenging because of the high uncertainty resulting from the unknown future motion of other traffic participants. Robust approaches guarantee safety, but tend to result in overly conservative motion planning. Hence, we propose to use Stochastic Model Predictive Control for vehicle control in urban driving, allowing to efficiently plan the vehicle trajectory, while maintaining the risk probability sufficiently low. For motion optimization, we propose to use a two-stage hierarchical structure that plans the trajectory and the maneuver separatel…
Automated vehicles require efficient and safe planning to maneuver in uncertain environments. Largely this uncertainty is caused by other traffic participants, e.g., surrounding vehicles. Future motion of surrounding vehicles is often difficult to predict. Whereas robust control approaches achieve safe, yet conservative motion planning for automated vehicles, Stochastic Model Predictive Control (SMPC) provides efficient planning in the presence of uncertainty. Probabilistic constraints are applied to ensure that the maximal risk remains below a predefined level. However, safety cannot be ensur…
The complexity of automated driving poses challenges for providing safety assurance. Focusing on the architecting of an Autonomous Driving Intelligence (ADI), i.e. the computational intelligence, sensors and communication needed for high levels of automated driving, we investigate so called safety supervisors that complement the nominal functionality. We present a problem formulation and a functional architecture of a fault-tolerant ADI that encompasses a nominal and a safety supervisor channel. We then discuss the sources of hazardous events, the division of responsibilities among the channel…
The human insulin-glucose metabolism is a time-varying process, which is partly caused by the changing insulin sensitivity of the body. This insulin sensitivity follows a circadian rhythm and its effects should be anticipated by any automated insulin delivery system. This paper presents an extension of our previous work on automated insulin delivery by developing a controller suitable for humans with Type 1 Diabetes Mellitus. Furthermore, we enhance the controller with a new kernel function for the Gaussian Process and deal with noisy measurements, as well as, the noisy training data for the G…
Institute of Industrial Science, The University of Tokyo（东京大学工业科学研究所）；Hino Motors, Ltd.（日野汽车公司）
Lane change is a very demanding driving task and number of traffic accidents are induced by mistaken maneuvers. An automated lane change system has the potential to reduce driver workload and to improve driving safety. One challenge is how to improve driver acceptance on the automated system. From the viewpoint of human factors, an automated system with different styles would improve user acceptance as the drivers can adapt the style to different driving situations. This paper proposes a method to design different lane change styles in automated driving by analysis and modeling of truck driver…
Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) rely on the correctness of position and other vehicle kinematics information to fulfill various driving tasks such as vehicle following, lane change, and collision avoidance. However, a malicious vehicle may send false sensor information to the other vehicles intentionally or unintentionally, which may cause traffic inconvenience or loss of human lives. Here, we take the advantage of cloud-computing and increase the resilience of CAVs to malicious vehicles by assuming each vehicle shares its local sensor information with other vehicles to create informat…
While automated driving technology has achieved a tremendous progress, the scalable and rigorous testing and verification of safe automated and autonomous driving vehicles remain challenging. This paper proposes a learning-based falsification framework for testing the implementation of an automated or self-driving function in simulation. We assume that the function specification is associated with a violation metric on possible scenarios. Prior knowledge is incorporated to limit the scenario parameter variance and in a model-based falsifier to guide and improve the learning process. For an exe…
Information and communication technology (ICT) is an enabler for establishing automated vehicles (AVs) in today's traffic systems. By providing complementary and/or redundant information via radio communication to the AV's perception by on-board sensors, higher levels of automated driving become more comfortable, safer, or even possible without interaction by the driver, especially in complex scenarios. Additionally, communication between vehicles and/or a central service can improve the efficiency of traffic flow. This paper presents a reference architecture for such an infrastructure-based s…
This paper presents a novel, safe control architecture (SCA) for controlling an important class of systems: safety-critical systems. Ensuring the safety of control decisions has always been a challenge in automatic control. The proposed SCA aims to address this challenge by using a Model Predictive Controller (MPC) that acts as a supervisor for the operating controller, in the sense that the MPC constantly checks the safety of the control inputs generated by the operating controller and intervenes if the control input is predicted to lead to a hazardous situation in the foreseeable future inva…
We propose a fully distributed control system architecture, amenable to in-vehicle implementation, that aims to safely coordinate connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) at road intersections. For control purposes, we build upon a fully distributed model predictive control approach, in which the agents solve a nonconvex optimal control problem (OCP) locally and synchronously, and exchange their optimized trajectories via vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. To accommodate a fast solution of the nonconvex OCPs, we apply the penalty convex-concave procedure which solves a convexified version …
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；Ford Motor Company（福特汽车公司）
It is essential for an automated vehicle in the field to perform discretionary lane changes with appropriate roadmanship - driving safely and efficiently without annoying or endangering other road users - under a wide range of traffic cultures and driving conditions. While deep reinforcement learning methods have excelled in recent years and been applied to automated vehicle driving policy, there are concerns about their capability to quickly adapt to unseen traffic with new environment dynamics. We formulate this challenge as a multi-Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) adaptation problem and dev…
University of Alcalá（阿尔卡拉大学）；Joint Research Centre, European Commission（欧盟委员会联合研究中心）
Conventional vehicles are certified through classical approaches, where different physical certification tests are set up on test tracks to assess required safety levels. These approaches are well suited for vehicles with limited complexity and limited interactions with other entities as last-second resources. However, these approaches do not allow to evaluate safety with real behaviors for critical and edge cases, nor to evaluate the ability to anticipate them in the mid or long term. This is particularly relevant for automated and autonomous driving functions that make use of advanced predic…
A new Taxonomy for Automated Driving: Structuring Applications based on their Operational Design Domain, Level of Automation and Automation Readiness
Technical University Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Munich Institute of Robotics and Machine Intelligence (MIRMI)（慕尼黑机器人与机器智能研究所）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Institute of Automotive Engineering（汽车工程研究所）
Jaguar Land Rover Limited（捷豹路虎有限公司）；University of Surrey（萨里大学）
Quantifying and encoding occupants' preferences as an objective function for the tactical decision making of autonomous vehicles is a challenging task. This paper presents a low-complexity approach for lane-change initiation and planning to facilitate highly automated driving on freeways. Conditions under which human drivers find different manoeuvres desirable are learned from naturalistic driving data, eliminating the need for an engineered objective function and incorporation of expert knowledge in form of rules. Motion planning is formulated as a finite-horizon optimisation problem with saf…
A Vehicle-in-the-Loop Simulator with AI-Powered Digital Twins for Testing Automated Driving Controllers
Department of Electrical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology（电子工程系，埃因霍温理工大学）；Siemens Digital Industries Software（西门子数字工业软件）；Department of Mechanical Engineering, Eindhoven University of Technology（机械工程系，埃因霍温理工大学）
RWTH Aachen University（亚琛工业大学）；Institute for Automotive Engineering（汽车工程研究所）
Safety assurance of automated driving systems must consider uncertain environment perception. This paper reviews literature addressing how perception testing is realized as part of safety assurance. We focus on testing for verification and validation purposes at the interface between perception and planning, and structure our analysis along the three axes 1) test criteria and metrics, 2) test scenarios, and 3) reference data. Furthermore, the analyzed literature includes related safety standards, safety-independent perception algorithm benchmarking, and sensor modeling. We find that the realiz…
University of California at Riverside（加州大学河滨分校）；Beijing Jiaotong University（北京交通大学）
Taking advantage of both vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication and automated driving technology, connected and automated vehicles are quickly becoming one of the transformative solutions to many transportation problems. However, in a mixed traffic environment at signalized intersections, it is still a challenging task to improve overall throughput and energy efficiency considering the complexity and uncertainty in the traffic system. In this study, we proposed a hybrid reinforcement learning (HRL) framework which combines the rule-based strategy and the deep reinforcement learning (deep RL…
Priority-Driven Safe Model Predictive Control Approach to Autonomous Driving Applications
Mechatronics group at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology（楚克大学电气工程系机电组）；Dept. of Electrical and Information Engineering, Italian National Ph.D. DAUSY, Polytechnic of Bari（意大利国家博士项目DAUSY巴里理工学院电子与信息工程系）
With advances in sensing, computing, and communication technologies, Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) are becoming feasible. The advent of CAVs presents new opportunities to improve the energy efficiency of individual vehicles. However, testing and verifying energy-efficient autonomous driving systems are difficult due to safety considerations and repeatability. In this paper, we present a co-simulation platform to develop and test novel vehicle eco-autonomous driving technologies named InfoRich, which incorporates the information from on-board sensors, V2X communications, and map datab…
A Right-of-Way Based Strategy to Implement Safe and Efficient Driving at Non-Signalized Intersections for Automated Vehicles
Graduate School at Shenzhen, Tsinghua University（清华大学深圳研究生院）；Department of Automation, BNRist, Tsinghua University（清华大学自动化系，北京理工大学）；traffic management solution division, traffic throughput through simulation experiments（交通管理解决方案部）
Scenario-based approaches have been receiving a huge amount of attention in research and engineering of automated driving systems. Due to the complexity and uncertainty of the driving environment, and the complexity of the driving task itself, the number of possible driving scenarios that an ADS or ADAS may encounter is virtually infinite. Therefore it is essential to be able to reason about the identification of scenarios and in particular critical ones that may impose unacceptable risk if not considered. Critical scenarios are particularly important to support design, verification and valida…
