Vehicle Control Issues for an Automated Highway System

Professor Karl Hedrick, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley

This talk summarizes vehicle control issues for automatically controlled vehicles. The emphasis will be on longitudinal control( throttle/brake ) for closely spaced vehicles but combined longitudinal/lateral controller design will also be discussed.The need for nonlinear control will be argued and sensor,actuator, and communication requirements will be presented. The issue of "disturbance propagation" upstream in a tightly spaced string of vehicles will be described.

This research was done as part of the California PATH program and experimental results will be shown for both longitudinal and lateral controlled vehicles.