A longitudinal control concept for merging of automated vehicles

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A longitudinal control concept for merging of automated vehicles

Cang Yang / Milacic, M. / Kurami, K.

As the most challenging aspect of IVHS, automated highway systems (AHS) have been under extensive research and development because they hold the promise of a multiple-fold increase in freeway capacity and provide dramatic enhancements in safety. Although there have been variegated AHS technological developments ranging from collision warning radars to fully equipped autonomous vehicles, most problems treated so far deal with the control of vehicles to safe-guard their close proximity, typically within a few meters and on a single freeway. Such examples include vehicle lateral lane-hold control and longitudinal spacing control. To meet the needs of the expected AHS demonstration, other indispensable issues of AHS are beginning to receive attention, e.g., entry/exit implementation of automated vehicles. This paper is a feasibility study of an automatic traffic merging concept the authors proposed for potential application to Intelligent Vehicle-Highway Systems (IVHS). The authors consider a freeway entrance where on-ramp vehicles are to merge into the highway traffic by actively tracking their designated gaps. A longitudinal control system based on homing guidance is proposed and analyzed. The effectiveness of the guidance and control algorithms has been tested through computer simulations. One important feature of this method is that the controller of an on-ramp vehicle utilizes mostly the relative positional information between the vehicle and its target gap. As such infrastructure support could be minimized.