Pre-Crash Vehicle Control and Manoeuvre Planning: A Step Towards Minimizing Collision Severity for Highly Automated Vehicles

Abstract

This paper addresses the control of a highly automated vehicle in a traffic scenario, where colliding with other traffic agents is unavoidable. Such a critical situation could be the result of a fault in the vehicle, late obstacle detection or the presence of an aggressive driver. We provide an approach that allows the vehicle’s control system to choose the manoeuvre that is likely to lead to the least severe injuries to vehicle occupants.The approach involves the off-line solving of an optimal control problem to create a set of trajectories based on controlling the steering angle rate and the braking rate at the vehicle’s limits. Occupant injury severity prediction, based on accident data with the focus on impact location, is used by a real-time collision control algorithm to choose a trajectory from the pre-computed optimal set. A simulation set-up is presented to illustrate the idea of the collision control algorithm in a simple scenario involving dynamic traffic agents.