Analysis and design of recovery behaviour of autonomous-vehicle avoidance manoeuvres

Autonomous vehicles allow utilisation of new optimal driving approaches that increase vehicle safety by combining optimal all-wheel braking and steering even at the limit of tyre-road friction. One important case is an avoidance manoeuvre that, in previous research, for example, has been approached by different optimisation formulations. An avoidance manoeuvre is typically composed of an evasive phase avoiding an obstacle followed by a recovery phase where the vehicle returns to normal driving. Here, an analysis of the different aspects of the recovery phase is presented, and a subsequent formulation is developed in several steps based on theory and simulation of a double lane-change scenario. Each step leads to an extension of the optimisation criterion. Two key results are a theoretical redundancy analysis of wheel-torque distribution and the subsequent handling of it. The overall contribution is a general treatment of the recovery phase in an optimisation framework, and the method is successfully demonstrated for three different formulations: lane-deviation penalty, minimum time, and squared lateral-error norm.