Partial order techniques for vehicle collision avoidance: application to an autonomous roundabout test-bed

Abstract

In this paper, we employ partial order techniques to develop linear complexity algorithms for guaranteed collision avoidance between vehicles at highway and roundabout mergings. These techniques can be employed by virtue of the rich structure offered by such traffic systems, which constrain vehicles to advance unidirectionally along a path. The algorithms are safe by construction while maintaining the liveness of the system. The proposed algorithms are on-line implemented in a decentralized fashion on an experimental testbed composed of two in-scale communicating vehicles continuously running on an autonomous roundabout system.