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

  • Lixing HuangEmail author
  • Dimitra Panagou
Conference paper
First Online:
Part of the Springer Proceedings in Advanced Robotics book series (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.

Keywords

Safe merging in highways Collision avoidance 
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Notes

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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© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Robotics InstituteUniversity of MichiganAnn ArborUSA
  2. 2.Aerospace EngineeringUniversity of MichiganAnn ArborUSA

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