Development and experimental validation of a semi-autonomous cooperative active safety system

Abstract

In this paper, the problem of collision avoidance between two vehicles is considered, in which one vehicle is autonomous and the other one is human-driven. This problem arises in cooperative active safety systems at traffic intersections, mergings, and roundabouts, in which some vehicles are equipped with on-board communication and automatic control, while others are not capable of communicating and are human-driven. We model the human driving behavior through a hybrid automaton, whose current mode is determined by the driver's decisions, and solve the problem as a safety control problem for hybrid systems with imperfect state information. The experimental results demonstrate that our solution is substantially less conservative than solutions employing worst-case design.