Supervisory control for intersection collision avoidance in the presence of uncontrolled vehicles

This paper describes the design of a supervisory controller (supervisor) that manages controlled vehicles to avoid intersection collisions in the presence of uncontrolled vehicles. Two main problems are addressed: verification of the safety of all vehicles at an intersection, and management of the i...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Ahn, Heejin, Colombo, Alessandro, Del Vecchio, Domitilla
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 2015
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/97413
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6472-8576
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9153-3491
Description
Summary:This paper describes the design of a supervisory controller (supervisor) that manages controlled vehicles to avoid intersection collisions in the presence of uncontrolled vehicles. Two main problems are addressed: verification of the safety of all vehicles at an intersection, and management of the inputs of controlled vehicles. For the verification problem, we employ an inserted idle-time scheduling approach, where the “inserted idle-time” is a time interval when the intersection is deliberately held idle for uncontrolled vehicles to safely cross the intersection. For the management problem, we design a supervisor that is least restrictive in the sense that it overrides controlled vehicles only when a safety violation becomes imminent. We analyze computational complexity and propose an efficient version of the supervisor with a quantified approximation bound.