No Arabic abstract
Vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is a crucial component of the future autonomous driving systems since it enables improved awareness of the surrounding environment, even without extensive processing of sensory information. However, V2V communication is prone to failures and delays, so a distributed fault-tolerant approach is required for safe and efficient transportation. In this paper, we focus on the intersection crossing (IC) problem with autonomous vehicles that cooperate via V2V communications, and propose a novel distributed IC algorithm that can handle an unknown number of communication failures. Our analysis shows that both safety and liveness requirements are satisfied in all realistic situations. We also found, based on a real data set, that the crossing delay is only slightly increased even in the presence of highly correlated failures.
The topic of this paper is the design of a fully distributed and real-time capable control scheme for the automation of road intersections. State of the art Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication technology is adopted. Vehicles distributively negotiate crossing priorities by a Consensus-Based Auction Algorithm (CBAA-M). Then, each agent solves a nonlinear Model Predictive Control (MPC) problem that computes the optimal trajectory avoiding collisions with higher priority vehicles and deciding the crossing order. The scheme is shown to be real-time capable and able to respond to sudden priority changes, e.g. if a vehicle gets an emergency call. Simulations reinforce theoretical results.
Several self-stabilizing time division multiple access (TDMA) algorithms are proposed for sensor networks. In addition to providing a collision-free communication service, such algorithms enable the transformation of programs written in abstract models considered in distributed computing literature into a model consistent with sensor networks, i.e., write all with collision (WAC) model. Existing TDMA slot assignment algorithms have one or more of the following properties: (i) compute slots using a randomized algorithm, (ii) assume that the topology is known upfront, and/or (iii) assign slots sequentially. If these algorithms are used to transform abstract programs into programs in WAC model then the transformed programs are probabilistically correct, do not allow the addition of new nodes, and/or converge in a sequential fashion. In this paper, we propose a self-stabilizing deterministic TDMA algorithm where a sensor is aware of only its neighbors. We show that the slots are assigned to the sensors in a concurrent fashion and starting from arbitrary initial states, the algorithm converges to states where collision-free communication among the sensors is restored. Moreover, this algorithm facilitates the transformation of abstract programs into programs in WAC model that are deterministically correct.
With the rapid development of autonomous driving, collision avoidance has attracted attention from both academia and industry. Many collision avoidance strategies have emerged in recent years, but the dynamic and complex nature of driving environment poses a challenge to develop robust collision avoidance algorithms. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a decentralized framework named RACE: Reinforced Cooperative Autonomous Vehicle Collision AvoidancE. Leveraging a hierarchical architecture we develop an algorithm named Co-DDPG to efficiently train autonomous vehicles. Through a security abiding channel, the autonomous vehicles distribute their driving policies. We use the relative distances obtained by the opponent sensors to build the VANET instead of locations, which ensures the vehicles location privacy. With a leader-follower architecture and parameter distribution, RACE accelerates the learning of optimal policies and efficiently utilizes the remaining resources. We implement the RACE framework in the widely used TORCS simulator and conduct various experiments to measure the performance of RACE. Evaluations show that RACE quickly learns optimal driving policies and effectively avoids collisions. Moreover, RACE also scales smoothly with varying number of participating vehicles. We further compared RACE with existing autonomous driving systems and show that RACE outperforms them by experiencing 65% less collisions in the training process and exhibits improved performance under varying vehicle density.
In sensor networks communication by broadcast methods involves many hazards, especially collision. Several MAC layer protocols have been proposed to resolve the problem of collision namely ARBP, where the best achieved success rate is 90%. We hereby propose a MAC protocol which achieves a greater success rate (Success rate is defined as the percentage of delivered packets at the source reaching the destination successfully) by reducing the number of collisions, but by trading off the average propagation delay of transmission. Our proposed protocols are also shown to be more energy efficient in terms of energy dissipation per message delivery, compared to the currently existing protocol.
The coordination of highly automated vehicles (or agents) in road intersections is an inherently nonconvex and challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a distributed motion planning scheme under reasonable vehicle-to-vehicle communication requirements. Each agent solves a nonlinear model predictive control problem in real time and transmits its planned trajectory to other agents, which may have conflicting objectives. The problem formulation is augmented with conditional constraints that enable the agents to decide whether to wait at a stopping line, if safe crossing is not possible. The involved nonconvex problems are solved very efficiently using the proximal averaged Newton method for optimal control (PANOC). We demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed approach in a realistic intersection crossing scenario.