Second order sliding mode control of vehicles with distributed collision avoidance capabilities

Recent research has shown that the longitudinal control of platoons of vehicles is appropriate to improve the traffic capacity of road networks while maintaining the safety distance between vehicles. This paper investigates the possibility of reducing the number of accidents involving pedestrians or other vulnerable road users (VRUs), like cyclists and motorcyclists, by providing the control systems of the vehicles of the platoon with some collision detection and avoidance capabilities. The control system proposed in this paper allows to maintain a desired distance from the preceeding vehicle, and, as a novelty with respect to other proposals, to avoid the collision with VRUs present on the road. The proposed control scheme is realized by means of a supervisor, which makes the decision on which is the appropriate current control mode for each controlled vehicle, and manages the switches among low-level controllers. The adopted control technique is the so-called sliding mode control methodology, which is particularly suitable to deal with the uncertainties and disturbances typical of automotive applications.