A Reference Governor-Based Autonomous Driving Control Strategy for Guaranteed Safe Overtaking

Autonomous driving technologies are expected to help alleviate traffic congestion and enhance road safety. This paper considers the problem of safe overtaking for autonomous highway driving. We propose an optimal control strategy based on reference governor for the ego vehicle to track a given reference trajectory of the longitudinal speed and <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Y</i>-position. At the same time, the strategy guarantees that the ego vehicle drives within the system operation limits and satisfies the safety constraints, e.g., to stay on the road and avoid collisions with the impeding vehicle. The uncertain longitudinal motions of the impeding vehicle are considered with the assumption that its speed and acceleration ranges are set-bounded. Furthermore, the proposed strategy preserves the use of an existing pre-stabilizing vehicle controller. The simulation results show that the proposed strategy is successfully implemented to ensure safe highway passing in different cases with various initial headways and speeds of the ego and impeding vehicles.