2022/03/31 by Mitchell Black, Mrdjan Janković, Black, Mitchell +5 · 4 citations
Engineering · #FOS: Electrical engineering #FOS: Mathematics #Optimization and Control (math.OC) #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #Traffic control and management #Vehicle Dynamics and Control Systems #Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks (VANETs) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2204.00127
openalex publication_date 2022/03/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
In this paper, we introduce a class of future-focused control barrier functions (ff-CBF) aimed at improving traditionally myopic CBF based control design and study their efficacy in the context of an unsignaled four-way intersection crossing problem for collections of both communicating and non-communicating autonomous vehicles. Our novel ff-CBF encodes that vehicles take control actions that avoid collisions predicted under a zero-acceleration policy over an arbitrarily long future time interval. In this sense the ff-CBF defines a virtual barrier, a loosening of which we propose in the form of a relaxed future-focused CBF (rff-CBF) that allows a relaxation of the virtual ff-CBF barrier far from the physical barrier between vehicles. We study the performance of ff-CBF and rff-CBF based controllers on communicating vehicles via a series of simulated trials of the intersection scenario, and in particular highlight how the rff-CBF based controller empirically outperforms a benchmark controller from the literature by improving intersection throughput while preserving safety and feasibility. Finally, we demonstrate our proposed ff-CBF control law on an intersection scenario in the laboratory environment with a collection of 5 non-communicating AION ground rovers.