Behaviour prediction function of an autonomous vehicle predicts the future states of the nearby vehicles based on the current and past observations of the surrounding environment. This helps enhance ...their awareness of the imminent hazards. However, conventional behavior prediction solutions are applicable in simple driving scenarios that require short prediction horizons. Most recently, deep learning-based approaches have become popular due to their promising performance in more complex environments compared to the conventional approaches. Motivated by this increased popularity, we provide a comprehensive review of the state-of-the-art of deep learning-based approaches for vehicle behavior prediction in this article. We firstly give an overview of the generic problem of vehicle behavior prediction and discuss its challenges, followed by classification and review of the most recent deep learning-based solutions based on three criteria: input representation, output type, and prediction method. The article also discusses the performance of several well-known solutions, identifies the research gaps in the literature and outlines potential new research directions.
Automated vehicles are increasingly getting main-streamed and this has pushed development of systems for autonomous manoeuvring (e.g., lane-change, merge, and overtake) to the forefront. A novel ...framework for situational awareness and trajectory planning to perform autonomous overtaking in high-speed structured environments (e.g., highway and motorway) is presented in this paper. A combination of a potential field like function and reachability sets of a vehicle are used to identify safe zones on a road that the vehicle can navigate towards. These safe zones are provided to a tube-based robust model predictive controller as reference to generate feasible trajectories for combined lateral and longitudinal motion of a vehicle. The strengths of the proposed framework are: 1) it is free from non-convex collision avoidance constraints; 2) it ensures feasibility of trajectory even if decelerating or accelerating while performing lateral motion; and 3) it is real-time implementable. The ability of the proposed framework to plan feasible trajectories for high-speed overtaking is validated in a high-fidelity IPG CarMaker and Simulink co-simulation environment.
Connected autonomous vehicles are considered as mitigators of issues such as traffic congestion, road safety, inefficient fuel consumption and pollutant emissions that current road transportation ...system suffers from. Connected autonomous vehicles utilise communication systems to enhance the performance of autonomous vehicles and consequently improve transportation by enabling cooperative functionalities, namely, cooperative sensing and cooperative manoeuvring. The former refers to the ability to share and fuse information gathered from vehicle sensors and road infrastructures to create a better understanding of the surrounding environment while the latter enables groups of vehicles to drive in a co-ordinated way which ultimately results in a safer and more efficient driving environment. However, there is a gap in understanding how and to what extent connectivity can contribute to improving the efficiency, safety and performance of autonomous vehicles. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to investigate the potential benefits that can be achieved from connected autonomous vehicles through analysing five use-cases: (i) vehicle platooning, (ii) lane changing, (iii) intersection management, (iv) energy management and (v) road friction estimation. The current paper highlights that although connectivity can enhance the performance of autonomous vehicles and contribute to the improvement of current transportation system performance, the level of achievable benefits depends on factors such as the penetration rate of connected vehicles, traffic scenarios and the way of augmenting off-board information into vehicle control systems.
In order to design an advanced human-automation collaboration system for highly automated vehicles, research into the driver's neuromuscular dynamics is needed. In this paper, a dynamic model of ...drivers' neuromuscular interaction with a steering wheel is first established. The transfer function and the natural frequency of the systems are analyzed. In order to identify the key parameters of the driver-steering-wheel interacting system and investigate the system properties under different situations, experiments with driver-in-the-loop are carried out. For each test subject, two steering tasks, namely the passive and active steering tasks, are instructed to be completed. Furthermore, during the experiments, subjects manipulated the steering wheel with two distinct postures and three different hand positions. Based on the experimental results, key parameters of the transfer function model are identified by using the Gauss-Newton algorithm. Based on the estimated model with identified parameters, investigation of system properties is then carried out. The characteristics of the driver neuromuscular system are discussed and compared with respect to different steering tasks, hand positions, and driver postures. These experimental results with identified system properties provide a good foundation for the development of a haptic take-over control system for automated vehicles.
In present-day highly-automated vehicles, there are occasions when the driving system disengages and the human driver is required to take-over. This is of great importance to a vehicle ʼ s ...safety and ride comfort. In the U.S state of California, the Autonomous Vehicle Testing Regulations require every manufacturer testing autonomous vehicles on public roads to submit an annual report summarizing the disengagements of the technology experienced during testing. On 1 January 2016, seven manufacturers submitted their first disengagement reports: Bosch, Delphi, Google, Nissan, Mercedes-Benz, Volkswagen, and Tesla Motors. This work analyses the data from these disengagement reports with the aim of gaining abetter understanding of the situations in which a driver is required to takeover, as this is potentially useful in improving the Society of Automotive Engineers ( SAE ) Level 2 and Level 3 automation technologies. Disengagement events from testing are classified into different groups based on attributes and the causes of disengagement are investigated and compared in detail. The mechanisms and time taken for take-over transition occurred in disengagements are studied. Finally, recommendations for OEMs, manufacturers, and government organizations are also discussed.
Although at present legislation does not allow drivers in a Level 3 autonomous vehicle to engage in a secondary task, there may become a time when it does. Monitoring the behaviour of drivers ...engaging in various non-driving activities (NDAs) is crucial to decide how well the driver will be able to take over control of the vehicle. One limitation of the commonly used face-based head tracking system, using cameras, is that sufficient features of the face must be visible, which limits the detectable angle of head movement and thereby measurable NDAs, unless multiple cameras are used. This paper proposes a novel orientation sensor based head tracking system that includes twin devices, one of which measures the movement of the vehicle while the other measures the absolute movement of the head. Measurement error in the shaking and nodding axes were less than 0.4°, while error in the rolling axis was less than 2°. Comparison with a camera-based system, through in-house tests and on-road tests, showed that the main advantage of the proposed system is the ability to detect angles larger than 20° in the shaking and nodding axes. Finally, a case study demonstrated that the measurement of the shaking and nodding angles, produced from the proposed system, can effectively characterise the drivers' behaviour while engaged in the NDAs of chatting to a passenger and playing on a smartphone.
The state-of-the-art decision and planning approaches for autonomous vehicles have moved away from manually designed systems, instead focusing on the utilisation of large-scale datasets of expert ...demonstration via Imitation Learning (IL). In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of IL approaches, primarily for the paradigm of end-to-end based systems in autonomous vehicles. We classify the literature into three distinct categories: 1) Behavioural Cloning (BC), 2) Direct Policy Learning (DPL) and 3) Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL). For each of these categories, the current state-of-the-art literature is comprehensively reviewed and summarised, with future directions of research identified to facilitate the development of imitation learning based systems for end-to-end autonomous vehicles. Due to the data-intensive nature of deep learning techniques, currently available datasets and simulators for end-to-end autonomous driving are also reviewed.
Recent advances in smart connected vehicles and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) are based upon the capture and processing of large amounts of sensor data. Modern vehicles contain many ...internal sensors to monitor a wide range of mechanical and electrical systems and the move to semi-autonomous vehicles adds outward looking sensors such as cameras, lidar, and radar. ITS is starting to connect existing sensors such as road cameras, traffic density sensors, traffic speed sensors, emergency vehicle, and public transport transponders. This disparate range of data is then processed to produce a fused situation awareness of the road network and used to provide real-time management, with much of the decision making automated. Road networks have quiet periods followed by peak traffic periods and cloud computing can provide a good solution for dealing with peaks by providing offloading of processing and scaling-up as required, but in some situations latency to traditional cloud data centres is too high or bandwidth is too constrained. Cloud computing at the edge of the network, close to the vehicle and ITS sensor, can provide a solution for latency and bandwidth constraints but the high mobility of vehicles and heterogeneity of infrastructure still needs to be addressed. This paper surveys the literature for cloud computing use with ITS and connected vehicles and provides taxonomies for that plus their use cases. We finish by identifying where further research is needed in order to enable vehicles and ITS to use edge cloud computing in a fully managed and automated way. We surveyed 496 papers covering a seven-year timespan with the first paper appearing in 2013 and ending at the conclusion of 2019.
For an autonomous vehicle to operate safely and effectively, an accurate and robust localization system is essential. While there are a variety of vehicle localization techniques in literature, there ...is a lack of effort in comparing these techniques and identifying their potentials and limitations for autonomous vehicle applications. Hence, this paper evaluates the state-of-the-art vehicle localization techniques and investigates their applicability on autonomous vehicles. The analysis starts with discussing the techniques which merely use the information obtained from on-board vehicle sensors. It is shown that although some techniques can achieve the accuracy required for autonomous driving but suffer from the high cost of the sensors and also sensor performance limitations in different driving scenarios (e.g., cornering and intersections) and different environmental conditions (e.g., darkness and snow). This paper continues the analysis with considering the techniques which benefit from off-board information obtained from V2X communication channels, in addition to vehicle sensory information. The analysis shows that augmenting off-board information to sensory information has potential to design low-cost localization systems with high accuracy and robustness, however, their performance depends on penetration rate of nearby connected vehicles or infrastructure and the quality of network service.
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