Collision avoidance strategies and coordinated control of passenger vehicles

Recent research has demonstrated the efficaciousness of the coordinated control of platoons of vehicles in order to homogenize the traffic flows and improve the exploitation of the capacity of road networks. Yet, taking into account the necessity of reducing, in the next years, the number of accidents involving pedestrians or other vulnerable road users (VRUs), like cyclists and motorcyclists, it seems useful to provide the control systems of the vehicles of the platoon with some collision detection and avoidance capability. This issue is investigated in this paper. The control system presented in this paper allows to maintain cruise conditions, and, as a novelty with respect to consolidated proposals, to avoid the collision with possible VRUs present on the road. The proposed control system is realized by means of vehicle supervisors, which, on the basis of the data acquired by the sensors, make the decision on which is the appropriate current control mode for each controlled vehicle, and manage the switches among low-level controllers. These are designed relying on a simple bicycle model, and according to a sliding mode control methodology. This choice is motivated by the robustness features of the sliding mode design, which appears particularly appropriate dealing with the automotive context.