A PREDICTIVE APPROACH TO ROADWAY DEPARTURE PREVENTION

Paper in proceeding, 2009

In this paper, we investigate predictive control approaches to the problem of roadway departure prevention via steering and braking. We assume a sensing infrastructure detecting road geometry and consider a two layers architecture consisting of a threat assessment and an intervention layer. In particular, the upper threat assessment layer detects the risk of roadway departure or vehi- cle instability within a future time horizon. If a risk of roadway departure or vehicle instability is detected, the lower intervention layer is enabled. The lat- ter is designed based on Model Predictive Control (MPC) approaches, where steering and braking interventions are the result of an optimization problem. This is formulated on the basis of vehicle state measurements and coming road information (e.g., road geometry, surface adhesion) and repeatedly solved over a moving future time horizon. Simulation and experimental results are presented, showing that the proposed approach effectively exploits road preview capabilities in order to issue earlier and less intrusive interventions, compared to standard Electronic Stability Con- trol (ESC) systems.