Division of Control, Automation and Mechatronics Department of Signal and Systems Chalmers Institute of Technology

Master thesis proposal

Vehicle Control in Cooperative Driving

Background

Recent advances in sensing and vehicle technologies have enabled significant progresses in the area of the active safety of passenger cars. Safety systems, assisting the driver in complex accident avoidance maneuvers, are already available in passenger cars. Even more complex vehicle systems, with autonomous driving capabilities, are expected to be available soon. Such smart vehicles are envisioned to not only improve drivers and passengers safety, but also the overall vehicle efficiency and fuel consumption. These results will be achieved by exploiting newly available information, about the surrounding environment, provided either by the other vehicles on the road or the infrastructure. The capability of communicating and interacting with other vehicles and road infrastructures is referred to as Cooperative Driving and is deemed to be the next challenge in vehicle technology. In The Netherlands, the Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC) initiative was held on 2011. In the GCDC, several teams consisting of car companies and suppliers, universities and research centers competed to accomplish a number of cooperative driving tasks. For further details, see www.gcdc.net. Chalmers University joined GCDC with a vehicle equipped with a cooperative driving system developed by a team of students and researchers, in collaboration with automotive industries. Chalmers team ended at the third place and our objective is to improve in future editions of GCDC.
Problem description

The cooperative driving system developed in this reasearch project for the GCDC will consist of several hardware and software components. Hardware components will include advanced sensors like, e.g., GPS, cameras and radars and communication devices. Software modules can be grouped in three main categories, i.e., communication, sensing and vehicle control. Hardware and software modules have to be then integrated in a real vehicle that will be evaluated and ranked in executing a set of given cooperative driving tasks. The driving tasks consist of vehicle platooning, i.e., a set of vehicles, in a platoon configuration, performing different manoeuvres like, e.g., stop and go at traffic lights, joining a platoon. The manouvres have to be performed while satisfying a set of requirements like, among others, bounding the inter-vehicle spacing, preserving the platoon stability and safety.

Purpose and aims

The goal of this master thesis project is to develop vehicle control algorithms for accomplishing a set of maneuvers in a platoon, while satisfying a set of given requirements. In particular, the performance requirements, set by the rules of the competition, will have to be first translated into specifications of the overall vehicle closed-loop system. Then, vehicle control systems will have to be designed in order to meet the specifications, given the limitations set by the sensing and communication modules (e.g., measurement noise, signals sampling rates, amount of info exchanged with other vehicles and infrastructure) and the vehicle actuators (e.g., braking force and engine torque). Two main outcomes are expected from this master thesis: (i) the definition of a set of requirements for the sensing and communication modules, in order to achieve the desired performance, and (ii) the design and development of vehicle control algorithms as trade-off between overall performance and limitation set by sensing and communication.
We are searching for

two or more highly motivated students from the master program in Systems, Control and Mechatronics or students with a similar background. Knowledge in automatic control and signal processing is required.
The master student will

gain competences on the (i) cooperative driving systems and (ii) simulation techniques. The master thesis student will (iii) be part of a team of students and researchers, from both academia and industry, with different backgrounds.
Contacts:

Dr. Paolo Falcone, tel.: 031-772 1803, E-mail: falcone@chalmers.se