Safe autonomous lane-switching controller using high-order control barrier and Lyapunov functions

Sammanfattning: With the rising interest in autonomous vehicles due to developments with electric cars and computer vision, controllers that provide safe, collision free manoeuvres are crucial for the advancement of this technology. In this thesis, a controller for autonomous vehicles for safe, collision-free lane switching on highways including adaptive cruise control is proposed. By solving a quadratic program (QP), where high-order control Lyapunov functions (HOCLF) and high-order control barrier functions (HOCBF) are used as conditions, the input is calculated. The forward invariance of the safe sets and, if the safety constraints allow it, stability of the reference values are guaranteed. The controller only relies on sensor measurements and does not require communication with other vehicles or a higher-level coordinator. Instead, the vehicles indicate their intention by their manoeuvres and influence each other’s safe sets. In contrast to other works, the controller is not rule-based and therefore no switching between control algorithms is required. A simulation validates the derived theoretic results. Furthermore, the common issue of implementing a CBF-based control algorithm in discrete-time is discussed.