Date of Award
9-12-2024
Publication Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.A.Sc.
Department
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Supervisor
Ahmed Hamdi Sakr
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Abstract
The emergence of automated vehicles (AVs) is expected to significantly enhance road safety, considering that more than $90\%$ of current traffic accidents are caused by human driver errors. One such technology, adaptive cruise control (ACC), operates with the primary objective of maintaining a safe distance from a preceding vehicle. Alongside conventional sensor inputs (such as radar or camera systems) used by the ego vehicle to ascertain the position and velocity of a preceding vehicle, vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) wireless communication can be used to convey critical information of the preceding vehicle(s). Therefore, equipping an AV with communication units to transition to a connected framework, referred to as connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs), enables gathering real-time information about neighboring vehicles. This integration leads to the development of cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC), enabling CAVs to establish platoons and enhance safety, travel comfort, string stability, and traffic throughput capacity. This work investigates the effectiveness of incorporating intent sharing messages which is a new class of V2V communication, in CACC systems. In contrast to traditional information exchange limited to current state information, intent sharing involves providing details about the future trajectory of connected vehicles. This work employs a concise representation of the intent of a connected vehicle, encompassing anticipated speed and acceleration bounds. The proposed approach, referred to as intent sharing-based CACC (I-CACC), utilizes a reinforcement learning (RL) based controller that leverages this additional intent information. Through an extensive simulation study using experimental datasets from Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM), we compare the performance of I-CACC to conventional CACC. The results reveal the superior performance of RL based I-CACC controller across various metrics, encompassing safety, comfort, string stability, and gap-keeping in CAVs by utilizing the intent in V2V communication.
Recommended Citation
Lahiri, Kanipakam, "Intent Sharing-Based Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control Systems" (2024). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 9396.
https://scholar.uwindsor.ca/etd/9396