Safe-by-Construction Autonomous Vehicle Overtaking using Control Barrier Functions and Model Predictive Control

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel integrated control framework combining control barrier functions and model predictive control to ensure safe overtaking maneuvers in autonomous vehicles, with proven safety guarantees and superior performance in simulations.

Contribution

It introduces a safe-by-construction overtaking strategy that guarantees safety through rigorous control barrier functions integrated with model predictive control.

Findings

Ensures collision-free overtaking in simulations.

Outperforms standard MPC in safety metrics.

Applicable to both autonomous and human-driven opposing vehicles.

Abstract

Ensuring safety for vehicle overtaking systems is one of the most fundamental and challenging tasks in autonomous driving. This task is particularly intricate when the vehicle must not only overtake its front vehicle safely but also consider the presence of potential opposing vehicles in the opposite lane that it will temporarily occupy. In order to tackle the overtaking task in such challenging scenarios, we introduce a novel integrated framework tailored for vehicle overtaking maneuvers. Our approach integrates the theories of varying-level control barrier functions (CBF) and time-optimal model predictive control (MPC). The main feature of our proposed overtaking strategy is that it is safe-by-construction, which enables rigorous mathematical proof and validation of the safety guarantees. We show that the proposed framework is applicable when the opposing vehicle is either fully autonomous or driven by human drivers. To demonstrate our framework, we perform a set of simulations for overtaking scenarios under different settings. The simulation results show the superiority of our framework in the sense that it ensures collision-free and achieves better safety performance compared with the standard MPC-based approach without safety guarantees.