Since the interest in autonomous driving solutions is massively increasing, the need for good and reliable control algorithms is growing every day. This project studies the performance of safe lane changes of a highly autonomous vehicle given the currently available perception of the environment, vehicle dynamics and desired comfort and speed requirements from the user. Also focus will be on when the vehicle decides to overtake other vehicles to move closer to its desired prescribed speed, while respecting the "rules of the road", i.e. not causing unexpected actions in relation to the other road participants. These requirements will then be converted into linear temporal logic statements for the purpose of automated synthesis of a receding horizon controller for longitudinal and lateral control of the vehicle. Thereby allowing it to make adjustments to the desired system behavior and computing a new control strategy, relatively easy and by definition, the resulting controller is formally guaranteed to meet the safety specifications at all times. Besides this search for formal specifications, a comparison is made with more conventional control techniques by reviewing a model predictive controller that was developed parallel to this project, showing its capabilities and discussing possible safety issues. (Author/publisher)
Abstract