Development of an Emergency Lane Change System in Highway Driving

This paper presents an approach to the lane change safety system for collision avoidance. The solution is presented in two distinct steps. We first propose a decision strategy based on a discrete time Markov process to determine the safe lane utilizing a set of transition probabilities. These probabilities are calculated according to the distance of the subject vehicle from the surrounding vehicles. The output of decision process is fed to a controller formulated using an ℋ_∞ scheme to move the vehicle to the desired lane. The overall strategy can be viewed as a combination of continuous control with a discrete decision process. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with the so-called human-driver model (HDM) based control, which has been broadly discussed in the literature. The simulation study shows the superiority of the proposed controller in terms of trajectory tracking of the reference path, disturbance rejection of the wind load, and effective control input.