Real-Time Distributed Automation Of Road Intersections

TL;DR

This paper presents a fully distributed, real-time control scheme for automated road intersections using V2V communication, consensus-based negotiation, and nonlinear MPC to optimize vehicle trajectories and crossing priorities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel distributed control framework combining V2V communication, consensus-based auction, and nonlinear MPC for intersection automation.

Findings

The scheme is real-time capable.

It responds effectively to sudden priority changes.

Simulations confirm theoretical performance.

Abstract

The topic of this paper is the design of a fully distributed and real-time capable control scheme for the automation of road intersections. State of the art Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication technology is adopted. Vehicles distributively negotiate crossing priorities by a Consensus-Based Auction Algorithm (CBAA-M). Then, each agent solves a nonlinear Model Predictive Control (MPC) problem that computes the optimal trajectory avoiding collisions with higher priority vehicles and deciding the crossing order. The scheme is shown to be real-time capable and able to respond to sudden priority changes, e.g. if a vehicle gets an emergency call. Simulations reinforce theoretical results.