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Hierarchical Design of Highway Merging Controller Using Navigation Vector Fields Under Bounded Sensing Uncertainty

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Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems

Part of the book series: Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics ((SPAR,volume 9))

Abstract

This paper presents a hierarchical control design for the motion of an autonomous car (ego-vehicle) through traffic on a highway. The ego-vehicle is assumed to sense the position and speed of the surrounding cars with bounded errors, and its objective is to move safely among traffic. The design is composed of a low-level tracking controller and a high-level decision-making process: the low-level controller is based on a navigation vector field and a velocity controller that safely drive the ego-car to selected merging points. The merging points are decided based upon a cost function capturing the traffic conditions. Simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    “Almost global” means the integral curves of the vector field converge to the origin, except for a set of initial conditions of measure zero, which converge to a singular point of the vector field other than the desired position. Here, the singularity exists where the ego vehicle, target vehicle and desired position are co-linear and the targets is in-between the ego car and desired point. However, the corresponding initial conditions are not met in either the merging or the lane-keeping case.

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Acknowledgements

Toyota Research Institute (TRI) provided funds to assist the authors with their research but this article solely reflects the opinions and conclusions of its authors and not TRI or any other Toyota entity.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Robotics Institute, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

    Lixing Huang

  2. Aerospace Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA

    Dimitra Panagou

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  1. Lixing Huang
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  2. Dimitra Panagou
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Lixing Huang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO, USA

    Nikolaus Correll

  2. Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Mac Schwager

  3. Department of Aerospace Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA

    Michael Otte

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Huang, L., Panagou, D. (2019). Hierarchical Design of Highway Merging Controller Using Navigation Vector Fields Under Bounded Sensing Uncertainty. In: Correll, N., Schwager, M., Otte, M. (eds) Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems. Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics, vol 9. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05816-6_24

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