Abstract

Automation of highways and in particular platooning of vehicles raises a number of control issues. In the design proposed in Varaiya (1993) these issues are addressed by a hierarchical structure consisting of both discrete event and continuous time controllers. The work presented here is an attempt at constructing a consistent interface between these two types of controllers. The design proposed is a finite state machine that communicates with the discrete controllers through discrete commands and flags and with the continuous controllers by issuing commands that get translated to inputs for the vehicle actuators. The operation of the proposed design is tested using COSPAN.

Highlights

  • The work presented here was carried out with the particular Automated Highway System AHS structure of 1, 2, 3 in mind

  • Theoretical studies indicate that the capacity increase if such a scheme is Research supported by the PATH program, Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Berkeley, under MOU 100 implemented successfully will be substantial

  • This will be done without a negative impact on passenger safety as, by having all the vehicles of a platoon follow each other with a small intra-platoon separation about 1 meter, if there is a failure and an impact is unavoidable, the relative speed of the vehicles involved will be small the damage to the vehicles and the injuries to the passengers will be minimized

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Summary

Introduction

The work presented here was carried out with the particular Automated Highway System AHS structure of 1, 2, 3 in mind. Its task is to receive the coordination layer commands and translate them to throttle, steering and braking input for the actuators on the vehicle For this purpose it utilizes a number of continuous time feedback control laws 6, 7, 8, 9 that use the readings provided by the sensors to calculate the actuator inputs required for a particular maneuver. The interface proposed here is in the form of a discrete event system DES It has a nite number of states nite state machine representing commands directed towards either the regulation layer e.g., invoke a speci c controller or towards the coordination layer e.g., notify the appropriate protocol that the requested maneuver was completed. Directions for extending this work are outlined

Coordination Layer
Regulation Layer
Interaction with Coordination Layer
Commands
Interaction with Continuous Time Controllers
Initialization
Safety Checks
Interaction with Physical Layer
Finite State Machine for the Interface
Supporting Finite State Machines
Automatic Veri cation
Concluding Remarks
A Figures
Full Text
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