Human-Machine Shared Control Approach for the Takeover of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control

Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) often requires human takeover for tasks such as exiting a freeway. Direct human takeover can pose significant risks, especially given the close-following strategy employed by CACC, which might cause drivers to feel unsafe and execute hard braking, potentially leading to collisions. This research aims to develop a CACC takeover controller that ensures a smooth transition from automated to human control. The proposed CACC takeover maneuver employs an indirect human-machine shared control approach, modeled as a Stackelberg competition where the machine acts as the leader and the human as the follower. The machine guides the human to respond in a manner that aligns with the machine's expectations, aiding in maintaining following stability. Additionally, the human reaction function is integrated into the machine's predictive control system, moving beyond a simple "prediction-planning" pipeline to enhance planning optimality. The controller has been verified to i) enable a smooth takeover maneuver of CACC; ii) ensure string stability within a specific Operational Design Domain (ODD) when human control authority is below 32.7%; iii) enhance both perceived and actual safety through machine interventions; and iv) reduce the impact on upstream traffic by up to 60%.

Less is More: Efficient Brain-Inspired Learning for Autonomous Driving Trajectory Prediction

Accurately and safely predicting the trajectories of surrounding vehicles is essential for fully realizing autonomous driving (AD). This paper presents the Human-Like Trajectory Prediction model (HLTP++), which emulates human cognitive processes to improve trajectory prediction in AD. HLTP++ incorporates a novel teacher-student knowledge distillation framework. The "teacher" model equipped with an adaptive visual sector, mimics the dynamic allocation of attention human drivers exhibit based on factors like spatial orientation, proximity, and driving speed. On the other hand, the "student" model focuses on real-time interaction and human decision-making, drawing parallels to the human memory storage mechanism. Furthermore, we improve the model's efficiency by introducing a new Fourier Adaptive Spike Neural Network (FA-SNN), allowing for faster and more precise predictions with fewer parameters. Evaluated using the NGSIM, HighD, and MoCAD benchmarks, HLTP++ demonstrates superior performance compared to existing models, which reduces the predicted trajectory error with over 11% on the NGSIM dataset and 25% on the HighD datasets. Moreover, HLTP++ demonstrates strong adaptability in challenging environments with incomplete input data. This marks a significant stride in the journey towards fully AD systems.

Mirroring the Parking Target: An Optimal-Control-Based Parking Motion Planner with Strengthened Parking Reliability and Faster Parking Completion

Automated Parking Assist (APA) systems are now facing great challenges of low adoption in applications, due to users' concerns about parking capability, reliability, and completion efficiency. To upgrade the conventional APA planners and enhance user's acceptance, this research proposes an optimal-control-based parking motion planner. Its highlight lies in its control logic: planning trajectories by mirroring the parking target. This method enables: i) parking capability in narrow spaces; ii) better parking reliability by expanding Operation Design Domain (ODD); iii) faster completion of parking process; iv) enhanced computational efficiency; v) universal to all types of parking. A comprehensive evaluation is conducted. Results demonstrate the proposed planner does enhance parking success rate by 40.6%, improve parking completion efficiency by 18.0%, and expand ODD by 86.1%. It shows its superiority in difficult parking cases, such as the parallel parking scenario and narrow spaces. Moreover, the average computation time of the proposed planner is 74 milliseconds. Results indicate that the proposed planner is ready for real-time commercial applications.

Space Domain based Ecological Cooperative and Adaptive Cruise Control on Rolling Terrain

Ecological Cooperative and Adaptive Cruise Control (Eco-CACC) is widely focused to enhance sustainability of CACC. However, state-of-the-art Eco-CACC studies are still facing challenges in adopting on rolling terrain. Furthermore, they cannot ensure both ecology optimality and computational efficiency. Hence, this paper proposes a nonlinear optimal control based Eco-CACC controller. It has the following features: i) enhancing performance across rolling terrains by modeling in space domain; ii) enhancing fuel efficiency via globally optimizing all vehicle's fuel consumptions; iii) ensuring computational efficiency by developing a differential dynamic programming-based solving method for the non-linear optimal control problem; iv) ensuring string stability through theoretically proving and experimentally validating. The performance of the proposed Eco-CACC controller was evaluated. Results showed that the proposed Eco-CACC controller can improve average fuel saving by 37.67% at collector road and about 17.30% at major arterial.

Accelerating the Evolution of Personalized Automated Lane Change through Lesson Learning

Personalization is crucial for the widespread adoption of advanced driver assistance system. To match up with each user's preference, the online evolution capability is a must. However, conventional evolution methods learn from naturalistic driving data, which requires a lot computing power and cannot be applied online. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a lesson learning approach: learning from driver's takeover interventions. By leveraging online takeover data, the driving zone is generated to ensure perceived safety using Gaussian discriminant analysis. Real-time corrections to trajectory planning rewards are enacted through apprenticeship learning. Guided by the objective of optimizing rewards within the constraints of the driving zone, this approach employs model predictive control for trajectory planning. This lesson learning framework is highlighted for its faster evolution capability, adeptness at experience accumulating, assurance of perceived safety, and computational efficiency. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed system consistently achieves a successful customization without further takeover interventions. Accumulated experience yields a 24% enhancement in evolution efficiency. The average number of learning iterations is only 13.8. The average computation time is 0.08 seconds.

Vehicles Swarm Intelligence: Cooperation in both Longitudinal and Lateral Dimensions

Longitudinal-only platooning methods are facing great challenges on running mobility, since they may be impeded by slow-moving vehicles from time to time. To address this issue, this paper proposes a vehicles swarming method coupled both longitudinal and lateral cooperation. The proposed method bears the following contributions: i) enhancing driving mobility by swarming like a bee colony; ii) ensuring the success rate of overtaking; iii) cruising as a string of platoon to preserve sustainability. Evaluations indicate that the proposed method is capable of maneuvering a vehicle swarm to overtake slow-moving vehicles safely and successfully. The proposed method is confirmed to improve running mobility by 12.04%. Swarming safety is ensured by a safe following distance. The proposed method's influence on traffic is limited within five upstream vehicles.

Safety-Aware Human-Lead Vehicle Platooning by Proactively Reacting to Uncertain Human Behaving

Human-Lead Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (HL-CACC) is regarded as a promising vehicle platooning technology in real-world implementation. By utilizing a Human-driven Vehicle (HV) as the platoon leader, HL-CACC reduces the cost and enhances the reliability of perception and decision-making. However, state-of-the-art HL-CACC technology still has a great limitation on driving safety for the lack of considering the leading human driver's uncertain behaving. In this study, a HL-CACC controller is designed based on Stochastic Model Predictive Control (SMPC). It is enabled to predict the driving intention of the leading Connected Human-Driven Vehicle (CHV). The proposed controller has the following features: i) enhanced perceived safety in oscillating traffic; ii) guaranteed safety against hard brakes; iii) computational efficient for real-time implementation. The proposed controller is evaluated on a PreScan&Simulink simulation platform. Real vehicle trajectory data is collected for the calibration of simulation. Results reveal that the proposed controller: i) improves perceived safety by 19.17% in oscillating traffic; ii) enhances actual safety by 7.76% against hard brake; iii) is confirmed with string stability. The computation time is approximately 3 milliseconds when running on a laptop equipped with an Intel i5-13500H CPU. This indicates the proposed controller is ready for real-time implementation.

Chat2Scenario: Scenario Extraction From Dataset Through Utilization of Large Language Model

The advent of Large Language Models (LLM) provides new insights to validate Automated Driving Systems (ADS). In the herein-introduced work, a novel approach to extracting scenarios from naturalistic driving datasets is presented. A framework called Chat2Scenario is proposed leveraging the advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities of LLM to understand and identify different driving scenarios. By inputting descriptive texts of driving conditions and specifying the criticality metric thresholds, the framework efficiently searches for desired scenarios and converts them into ASAM OpenSCENARIO and IPG CarMaker text files. This methodology streamlines the scenario extraction process and enhances efficiency. Simulations are executed to validate the efficiency of the approach. The framework is presented based on a user-friendly web app and is accessible via the following link: https://github.com/ftgTUGraz/Chat2Scenario.

Faster Federated Learning with Decaying Number of Local SGD Steps

In Federated Learning (FL) client devices connected over the internet collaboratively train a machine learning model without sharing their private data with a central server or with other clients. The seminal Federated Averaging (FedAvg) algorithm trains a single global model by performing rounds of local training on clients followed by model averaging. FedAvg can improve the communication-efficiency of training by performing more steps of Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) on clients in each round. However, client data in real-world FL is highly heterogeneous, which has been extensively shown to slow model convergence and harm final performance when $K > 1$ steps of SGD are performed on clients per round. In this work we propose decaying $K$ as training progresses, which can jointly improve the final performance of the FL model whilst reducing the wall-clock time and the total computational cost of training compared to using a fixed $K$. We analyse the convergence of FedAvg with decaying $K$ for strongly-convex objectives, providing novel insights into the convergence properties, and derive three theoretically-motivated decay schedules for $K$. We then perform thorough experiments on four benchmark FL datasets (FEMNIST, CIFAR100, Sentiment140, Shakespeare) to show the real-world benefit of our approaches in terms of real-world convergence time, computational cost, and generalisation performance.

Illumination and Temperature-Aware Multispectral Networks for Edge-Computing-Enabled Pedestrian Detection

Accurate and efficient pedestrian detection is crucial for the intelligent transportation system regarding pedestrian safety and mobility, e.g., Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, and smart pedestrian crosswalk systems. Among all pedestrian detection methods, vision-based detection method is demonstrated to be the most effective in previous studies. However, the existing vision-based pedestrian detection algorithms still have two limitations that restrict their implementations, those being real-time performance as well as the resistance to the impacts of environmental factors, e.g., low illumination conditions. To address these issues, this study proposes a lightweight Illumination and Temperature-aware Multispectral Network (IT-MN) for accurate and efficient pedestrian detection. The proposed IT-MN is an efficient one-stage detector. For accommodating the impacts of environmental factors and enhancing the sensing accuracy, thermal image data is fused by the proposed IT-MN with visual images to enrich useful information when visual image quality is limited. In addition, an innovative and effective late fusion strategy is also developed to optimize the image fusion performance. To make the proposed model implementable for edge computing, the model quantization is applied to reduce the model size by 75% while shortening the inference time significantly. The proposed algorithm is evaluated by comparing with the selected state-of-the-art algorithms using a public dataset collected by in-vehicle cameras. The results show that the proposed algorithm achieves a low miss rate and inference time at 14.19% and 0.03 seconds per image pair on GPU. Besides, the quantized IT-MN achieves an inference time of 0.21 seconds per image pair on the edge device, which also demonstrates the potentiality of deploying the proposed model on edge devices as a highly efficient pedestrian detection algorithm.