Game-Theoretic Model Predictive Control for Safety-Assured Autonomous Vehicle Overtaking in Mixed-Autonomy Environment

This work proposes a robust control strategy for an autonomous vehicle to overtake safely and comfortably a human-driven vehicle. The proposed scheme designs a collision-avoidance constraint setup that comprehensively coordinates dimension-based and velocity-dependent constraints to fulfil the safety criteria. A three-phase control framework is proposed for the overtaking task, subject to separate collision-avoidance constraints in lane changing, passing, and merging phases. Moreover, the proposed method utilises a Stackelberg game model to interactively involve the human-driven overtaken vehicle behaviours in the online optimisation loop. To further cope with uncertainties caused by the human driver, the optimisation is solved by a robust model predictive controller to guarantee the avoidance of collisions. Numerical case studies verify that the proposed framework is capable of overtaking not only a cooperative human-driven vehicle but also an uncooperative human-driven vehicle with safe and comfortable trajectories.