California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

The purpose of this paper is to design and test a vehicle control system in order to achieve full vehicle automation in the longitudinal direction for several modes of operation, where the infrastructure manages the vehicle following. A supervisory controller is designed to provide the required intelligence for the modes. The controller process input and sends the appropriate commands to the brake and throttle controllers. It makes decisions about normal, emergency and transition operations so that the resulting motion of vehicle is safe and follows Automated Highway System (AHS) objectives. Simulation results are used to test the performance of the designated controllers. Finally, the experimental results of a vehicle following test conducted on I-15 demonstrate the effectiveness of the controller in an actual highway environment.