Research Projects

The development of connected autonomous vehicles, known as vehicle platoons, is a promising approach to alleviate traffic congestion and improve transportation efficiency, passenger safety, and emissions. However, deploying autonomous platoons in dedicated lanes of highways with fully automated traffic systems will require time due to technical and regulatory constraints. Until then, autonomous vehicles must be controlled while driving in coordination with human-operated vehicles on road networks. This mixed traffic scenario makes platoon control problems even more challenging. One or more drivers of the fleet may feel a loss of trust in the autonomous decision-making and may intervene to ensure safe driving, potentially leading to platoon splitting. The issue becomes more complex when potentially risky driving conditions are predicted or encountered while the platoon overtakes a human-driven vehicle. This project aims to develop resilient control techniques to ensure string stability of heterogeneous vehicle platoons preserving inter-vehicular spacing in complicated traffic scenarios and address overtaking phenomena in uncertain driving environments resulting in sudden human intervention. The project will leverage the negative imaginary (NI) systems theory, trust-based feedback mechanism, and Artificial Potential Field techniques to solve the string stability problem of multi-lane hybrid vehicle platoons considering various overtaking scenarios. The proposed platoon control schemes will also address scenarios when a platoon splits due to human-intervened braking to avoid anticipated risky situations and merge after safety is restored.