Correctness Guarantees for the Composition of Lane Keeping and Adaptive Cruise Control

TL;DR

This paper presents a control method that guarantees safety when combining lane keeping and adaptive cruise control, using control barrier functions and quadratic programming for real-time implementation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel control synthesis approach that ensures safety specifications are met for combined driver assistance modules with a closed-form quadratic program solution.

Findings

Control barrier functions guarantee safety in simulations.

The quadratic program can be solved in closed form for real-time use.

Simulations in Carsim validate the approach's effectiveness.

Abstract

This paper develops a control approach with correctness guarantees for the simultaneous operation of lane keeping and adaptive cruise control. The safety specifications for these driver assistance modules are expressed in terms of set invariance. Control barrier functions are used to design a family of control solutions that guarantee the forward invariance of a set, which implies satisfaction of the safety specifications. The control barrier functions are synthesized through a combination of sum-of-squares program and physics-based modeling and optimization. A real-time quadratic program is posed to combine the control barrier functions with the performance-based controllers, which can be either expressed as control Lyapunov function conditions or as black-box legacy controllers. In both cases, the resulting feedback control guarantees the safety of the composed driver assistance modules in a formally correct manner. Importantly, the quadratic program admits a closed-form solution that can be easily implemented. The effectiveness of the control approach is demonstrated by simulations in the industry-standard vehicle simulator Carsim.