Steering Action-aware Adaptive Cruise Control for Teleoperated Driving

TL;DR

This paper introduces a steering action-aware adaptive cruise control system for teleoperated vehicles that ensures safety by overriding human commands when necessary, demonstrated through simulations and real-world experiments.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel ACC approach that considers steering actions to maintain safety, outperforming existing methods in teleoperation scenarios.

Findings

The approach effectively prevents collisions in simulations.

It maintains safety even with potentially hazardous human commands.

Demonstrated success on a 1:10-scale vehicle testbed.

Abstract

In this paper, a steering action-aware Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) approach for teleoperated road vehicles is proposed. In order to keep the vehicle in a safe state, the ACC approach can override the human operator's velocity control commands. The safe state is defined as a state from which the vehicle can be stopped safely, no matter which steering actions are applied by the operator. This is achieved by first sampling various potential future trajectories. In a second stage, assuming the trajectory with the highest risk, a safe and comfortable velocity profile is optimized. This yields a safe velocity control command for the vehicle. In simulations, the characteristics of the approach are compared to a Model Predictive Control-based approach that is capable of overriding both, the commanded steering angle as well as the velocity. Furthermore, in teleoperation experiments with a 1:10-scale vehicle testbed, it is demonstrated that the proposed ACC approach keeps the vehicle safe, even if the control commands from the operator would have resulted in a collision.