Towards a real-time architecture to control an autonomous vehicle in multi-vehicle environment

This paper copes with the problem of motion execution monitoring for a car-like vehicle moving in a subset of the road network. The final goal is to design an architecture for planning and controlling the motion of the vehicle. This architecture must enable the vehicle to optimize its behavior autonomously and in real-time, i.e., to avoid stationary and moving obstacles in its local environment while respecting the highway code and its own kinematic and dynamic constraints. To resolve the problems of motion planning, motion execution monitoring and command generation (control), an intermediate step where the vehicle is still driven by a human driver so its control is replaced by an assistance of the driver through a man-machine interface is proposed. Work concerning the vehicle motion execution monitoring within this simplified architecture is reported. The framework of this program is the Pro-Lab II demonstrator whose purpose is to develop an electronic co-pilot to assist the human driver.