A Review of Autonomous Road Vehicle Integrated Approaches to an Emergency Obstacle Avoidance Maneuver
This is an incremental review paper that synthesizes existing knowledge for researchers and developers working on autonomous vehicle safety systems.
This review paper examines systems for emergency obstacle avoidance maneuvers in autonomous vehicles at highway speeds, identifying state-of-the-art approaches in path planning, decision-making, and control methods while suggesting future directions for development.
As passenger vehicle technologies have advanced, so have their capabilities to avoid obstacles, especially with developments in tires, suspensions, steering, as well as safety technologies like ABS, ESC, and more recently, ADAS systems. However, environments around passenger vehicles have also become more complex, and dangerous. There have previously been studies that outline driver tendencies and performance capabilities when attempting to avoid obstacles while driving passenger vehicles. Now that autonomous vehicles are being developed with obstacle avoidance capabilities, it is important to target performance that meets or exceeds that of human drivers. This manuscript highlights systems that are crucial for an emergency obstacle avoidance maneuver (EOAM) and identifies the state-of-the-art for each of the related systems, while considering the nuances of traveling at highway speeds. Some of the primary EOAM-related systems/areas that are discussed in this review are: general path planning methods, system hierarchies, decision-making, trajectory generation, and trajectory-tracking control methods. After concluding remarks, suggestions for future work which could lead to an ideal EOAM development, are discussed.