Automatic Lane Change Maneuver in Dynamic Environment Using Model Predictive Control Method

The lane change maneuver is one of the typical maneuvers in various driving situations. Therefore the automatic lane change function is one of the key functions for autonomous vehicles. Many researches have been conducted in this field. Most existing work focused on the solutions for the static environment and assume that the surrounding vehicles are running at constant speeds. However, in reality, if not all the vehicles on the road are fully autonomous, the situation could be much more complicated and the ego vehicle has to deal with the dynamic environment. This paper proposes a Model Predictive Control (MPC)-based method to achieve automatic lane change in a dynamic environment. A two-wheel dynamic bicycle model, which combines the longitudinal and lateral motion of the ego vehicle, together with a utility function, which helps to automatically determine the target lane have been used in the algorithm. The simulation results have demonstrated the capability of the proposed algorithm in a dynamic environment.

I. INTRODUCTION

Driving on the highway is always a stressful and tedious task. That is why many accidents have occurred on highways, and a lot of researchers have devoted their effort on developing autonomous vehicles which achieves safe driving on highways. One of the key aspects of driving on highway is the lane change maneuver, as it is one of the riskiest maneuvers on highways. According to [1], the maneuver is not only responsible for 4-10% of all the traffic accidents, but also the reason for 10% of latency on the roads and 7% of the total crash fatalities. In Netherlands, lane change maneuver was responsible for 12.6% of all the traffic accident [2]. In Canada, 9.8% fatalities related to car crash was caused by lane change [3]. In the United States of American, 13,939 traffic accidents result from lane change and 24565 were killed during 1994 to 2005 [4]. The inappropriate lane change causes even more problems in developing countries, such as China and India. According to the report from the Chinese High Traffic Safety Administration, 60% of the large traffic accidents on highway resulted from or were related to lane changes [5]. Due to the great proportion of traffic accidents caused by the lane change, traffic safety administration agencies, funding bodies and vehicle companies have invested a lot in developing safe autonomous lane change systems.