Decentralized Vehicle Coordination and Lane Switching without Switching of Controllers

TL;DR

This paper introduces a decentralized control method for autonomous vehicle lane changes that ensures safety and collision avoidance without switching controllers, using high-order control barrier functions and quadratic programming.

Contribution

It presents a novel decentralized controller design that coordinates vehicle maneuvers through coordination functions, avoiding controller switching and enabling safe lane changes.

Findings

Controller achieves collision-free lane switching in simulations

Decentralized approach reduces computational complexity

Effective in real-time autonomous vehicle scenarios

Abstract

This paper proposes a controller for safe lane change manoeuvres of autonomous vehicles using high-order control barrier and Lyapunov functions. The inputs are calculated using a quadratic program (CLF-CBF-QP) which admits short calculation times. The controller allows for adaptive cruise control, lane following, lane switching and ensures collision avoidance at all times. The novelty of the controller is the decentralized approach to the coordination of vehicles without switching of controllers. In particular, vehicles indicate their manoeuvres which influences their own safe region and that of neighboring vehicles. This is achieved by introducing so-called coordination functions in the design of control barrier functions. In a relevant simulation example, the controller is validated and its effectiveness is demonstrated.