Path and Speed Control of a Heavy Vehicle for Collision Avoidance Manoeuvres

In an emergency situation prior to an imminent accident, first in-vehicle warning systems would intervene and aim to make the driver to take a suitable action. If the risk of accident was not eliminated, then an autonomous collision avoidance manoeuvre can prevent it. In this work, path and speed control are intended to be used to perform such a manoeuvre by using steering and braking actuators respectively. In order to provide actuators with suitable control inputs, first a path is planned for the heavy vehicle to follow during the manoeuvre. Then the path is used to calculate feedforward control inputs whereas a feedback controller assures the path tracking by compensating for errors. As a result, a robust path planning and control algorithm is designed and implemented that can perform autonomous collision avoidance manoeuvres for a heavy vehicle. Promising simulation results support ongoing works on vehicle demonstration and experiments on a real heavy vehicle.