Automating lane changes and collision avoidance on highways via distributed agreement

This work presents a distributed hierarchical control strategy for fleets of autonomous vehicles cruising on a highway with diverse desired speeds. The goal is to design a control scheme that can be employed in scenarios where only vehicle-to-vehicle communication is available and where vehicles need to negotiate and agree on their positions on the road. To this end, after reaching an agreement on the lane speed with other traffic participants, each vehicle decides whether to keep cruising along the current lane or to move into another one. In the latter case, it negotiates the entry point with others by taking part in a distributed auction. An onboard controller computes an optimal trajectory transferring the vehicle with agreed velocity to the desired lane while avoiding collisions.