Obstacle Avoidance For Autonomous Vehicle Driving On Highways Based On MPC

With the rapid development of China’s economy and the improvement of people’slive, the car has become an important part in modern people’s daily lives. The increasingnumber of non-professional drivers and trafc density has lead to rising accident rates,and brought great losses to people’s lives and property. The characteristics of fast trafcspeed in highway improve social efciency, and increase vehicle security, but also takemore seriously consequences of highway trafc accidents. More and more concern hasbeen focused on trafc safety in modern society. Bumpers, seat belts, airbags and otherpassive safety technology protect the safety of passengers in a trafc accident as far aspossible, reduce the degree of injury in a road accident, but can’t prevent trafc accidentsefectively.As the vehicle safety concept in people’s minds has been changing and improv-ing, the passive safety technology has been unable to meet the requirements of vehiclesafety performance, and the research of vehicle active safety technology has become a hottopic at home and abroad. The study of autonomous vehicles obstacle avoidance prob-lem in highway has great significance to improve the safety performance of vehicles anddevelop the active safety technology, and is also the main contents of this article.Firstly, through a reasonable assumption and simplification of vehicle”bicycle”model, we get a state space form of the vehicle two degrees model, and design predictivecontrol algorithms for vehicle cruise and overtake operations. To meet the lateral stabilityrequirements of vehicles travelings on the road, the lateral acceleration of vehicle masswas chosen as a constraint in the control algorithms.When vehicles traveling on the highway, the surrounding environment are extremelycomplex and are changing dynamically. And single control algorithm can’t make thevehicle driving safely on the highway. Therefore, after the highway environment wasanalyzed, the highway structured environments is described with mathematical language,such as the highway lane, lane security, the lane availability, the distance between vehiclesand obstacles. Based on the analysis of the vehicle braking process, this contributiondefines the vehicle’s braking distance, critical safe distance and a safe distance. According to the trafc rules, the paper develops a safe driving strategy for vehicles driving on thehighway with the combination of the description of highway structure environmental andthe definition of the safe distance.The traditional vehicle dynamics simulation based on numerical calculation showthe results with data, figures, or table. This simulation method runs fast and has nospecial requirement for computers. But the results are inflexible and not subjective image,the information is stereotypical serial. This paper builds highway virtual reality modelwith text editor VrmlPad, and builds vehicle with three-dimensional drawing software.Combing the virtual reality models with the graphic user interface and our laboratory’s14degrees of freedom vehicle model, a vehicle dynamics virtual reality simulation platformis built. The simulation results show that the platform displays simulation results with avivid and easy-to-understand way.There are still some topics that deserve further study. For example, the simulationenvironment of the vehicle safe driving strategy is straight road. Much work needs to bedone for further validating the efectiveness of the proposed control strategy and controlalgorithm on curved roads; although the virtual reality simulation platform in the paperis able to vividly display the vehicle’s athletic stance and dynamic information of thesurrounding environment, it shows a lack of characterization of the amount of vehiclelateral acceleration, and other variables. So the virtual reality simulation platform stillneeds further improvement.