This Paper Has Been Mechanically Scanned. Some Errors May Have Been Inadvertently Introduced. Integrated Maneuvering Control Design and Experiments: Report for Phase I11 Report for Phase-i11 Integrated Maneuvering Control Design and Experiments (m.o.u.#99)

In this report, a control system called CICC has be presented for vehicle-followig and collision-avoidance. This system contains several sub-systems, such as cruise control and distancing control, each of which has also been described. While each sub-system is designed to maintain the system stability, CICC achieves good comfort as well as sufficient capacity of avoiding collisions. The performances of a CICC have been evaluated through simulations with a nonlinear vehicle model . The vehicle model used in this report is the same as that presented in [9], which has been used for the simulations in the PATH project. This vehicle model contains several non-linearities to emulate real vehicle responses while eliminating excessive complexity. A simplified vehicle model to implement CICC has also been presented. When implementing a CICC, the robustness of CICC should be evaluated because there must exist some modeling errors. The simulation consist of various scenarios on highways, such as catching-up and cutting-in,and,depending on these situations, the performance of a CICC will be compared with nominal headway control and with other CICC's, whose specific functions are turned off. Vehicles within a platoon depend on a communication network to provide the information necessary to maintain stable control at such close intervehicular spacings. To join two platoons together, or to split one platoon apart "on the fly" requires that this communication network be disturbed. A protocol must be developed for each of these maneuvers such that the control information being passed through this network remains as unperturbed as possible during the reconfiguration of the platoon networking structure. A protocol for a platoon split maneuver has been developed in chapter 3, and is being readied for testing. It was designed with a multilayered communications architecture in mind (which currently exists only in theory, but is to be implemented in the near future). In order to implement the protocol within the currently existing software in the test vehicles, no fundamental changes in the protocol were necessary. However, certain abilities of the multilayered architecture had to be added into the existing software. As this work is just entering the test stage, results are not available yet. The control structure for automated vehicles in an Automated Highway System is based on the idea of multiple-surface sliding control. The "upper" surface determines a desired net torque while the "lower" surface determines the required throttle angle or brake pressure needed to achieve the desired torque. Chapter 4 presents an upper surface control law for performing longitudinal transition maneuvers. The maneuvers use desired velocity trajectories which are based on maintaining safety and comfort throughout the maneuver. The control law chosen is a sliding controller due to the non-linearities in the dynamics and the uncertainties in the parameters. The controller was implemented into experimental vehicles and tested at highway speeds. Control laws for join maneuvers were successfully implemented. Quantitative results have been presented.