Assessment of a prediction-based strategy for mixingautonomous and manually driven vehicles in an intersection

Sammanfattning: The introduction of autonomous vehicles in traffic is driven by expected gains in multiple areas, such as improvement of health and safety, better resource utilization, pollution reduction and greater convenience. The development of more competent algorithms will determine the rate and level of success for the ambitions around autonomous vehicles. In this thesis work an intersection management system for a mix of autonomous and manually driven vehicles is created. The purpose is to investigate the strategy to combine turn intention prediction for manually driven vehicles with scheduling of autonomous vehicle. The prediction method used is support vector machine (SVM) and scheduling of vehicles have been made by dividing the intersection into an occupancy grid and apply different safety levels. Real-life data comprising recordings of large volumes of traffic through an intersection has been combined with simulated vehicles to assess the relevance of the new algorithms. Measurements of collision rate and traffic flow showed that the algorithms behaved as expected. A miniature vehicle based on a prototype for an autonomous RC-car has been designed with the purpose of testing of the algorithms in a laboratory setting.