Hierarchical longitudinal controller for rear-end collision avoidance

Rear-end collision is a very serious problem in modern traffic situations, and there have been a great number of research reports on the longitudinal control method for road vehicles. In many cases, however, the control problem is formulated under platoon configuration and for some predictable noncollision situations. For predictable collision situations, regional and hierarchical approaches have been employed, but these approaches render difficulties due to ignorance for modeling error and logical error in a decision process. In this paper, the vehicle control for collision avoidance is studied with two control objectives, i.e., minimization of the safety distance error and regulation of the relative velocity between two vehicles. For this, a longitudinal controller using terminal sliding mode (TSM) with hierarchical structure is proposed for rear-end collision avoidance. The TSM is employed to achieve convergence in finite time, while the hierarchical approach is used for the system to accommodate the intelligence of the driver to handle various situations. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is verified by software simulations.