Decision making for autonomous vehicles: Combining safety and optimality

In this paper, we propose a novel decision maker design for an autonomous vehicle driving on a highway, considering safety and optimality, and which is scalable, i.e., remains computationally tractable for more complex situations. This is realized in two stages. First, all safe actions are found, and second, from these actions the optimal action...

Transitions to manual control from highly automated driving in non-critical truck platooning scenarios

Automated truck platooning is getting an increasing interest for its potentially beneficial effects on fuel consumption, driver workload, traffic flow efficiency, and safety. Nevertheless, one major challenge lies in the safe and comfortable transitions of control from the automated system back to the human drivers, especially when they have...

The effect of see-through truck on driver monitoring patterns and responses to critical events in truck platooning

Automated platooning of trucks has its beneficial effects on energy saving and traffic flow efficiency. The vehicles in a platoon, however, need to maintain an extremely short headway to achieve these goals, which will result in a heavily blocked front view for the driver in a following truck. Monitoring surrounding traffic environment and...

Cut-in Scenario Prediction for Automated Vehicles

Truck platooning is gaining more and more interest thanks to the benefits on improved traffic efficiency, reduced fuel consumption and emissions. To gain these benefits, it typically involves small following distances . Due to the small following distances, the cut-in manoeuvre of target vehicles becomes safety critical and requires the...

Adaptive Virtual Tow Bar, research results 2016

This document reports the advances made in 2016 for the Early Research Program (ERP) Human Enhancement: Adaptive Automation, sub-project Adaptive Virtual Tow Bar. The ambition of the large scale TNO Early Research Program (ERP) Human Enhancement is to develop a transparent (human-in-the-loop) adaptive automation platform that substantially...

The modeling of transfer of steering between automated vehicle and human driver using hybrid control framework

Proponents of autonomous driving pursue driverless technologies, whereas others foresee a gradual transition where there will be automated driving systems that share the control of the vehicle with the driver. With such advances it becomes pertinent that the developed automated systems need to be safe. One crucial aspect of safety is to prove...

Adaptive Virtual Tow Bar and Transition of Control: A truck driving simulator study

Background : Truck platooning, with trucks being virtually connected, is getting more and more attention. Truck platooning offers the potential for substantial fuel savings while allowing the truck driver in the platoon to take a rest. However, at the current state of technology, truck drivers are still required to be alert and ready to...

Automated driving functions giving control back to the driver: A simulator study on driver state dependent strategies

Many car companies and other organisations are working hard to get automated driving on the road. Where some prefer driverless cars, most foresee a future where control of the vehicle will be shared between the driver and automated functions in the coming years. Sharing tasks and responsibilities creates the interesting challenge of transition...

Towards guidelines for transition of control

There is a trend in Advanced Driver Assistance systems towards increased automation. Current systems and near-future systems will not yet be able to deal with all different situations that can be encountered and therefore need to share control of the vehicle with the driver. To safely and comfortably share control, a method for the transition of...

Advances of the active safety lab vehil

Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) are developed to support the driver and by doing so, increase the comfort and safety of driving. Many are emerging on the market nowadays and current developments in the area of ADAS evolve to support the driver in more and more difficult situations such as crossings and encounters with Vulnerable Road...

Design of active safety systems for a tram using preScan

In a study the traffic safety of trams was identified as an important area for traffic safety improvement. Hence, TNO and a public transport company started a co-operation to improve the traffic safety of trams and lightrail through driver assistant systems. Both from identified situations and measured situations the most interesting were...

Implementing multiple intelligent services in an intelligent vehicle with a safe workload aware HMI

The car occupants of tomorrow will enjoy a growing variety of in-vehicle services and driver assistance systems. The challenge is to make these services not only intelligent and omnipresent but, most important of all, safe to use. TNO started a research program in 2001 called CoDrive that addresses this challenge. Within CoDrive TNO developed...

Steer-by-wire innovations and demonstrator

Arguments for 'by-wire' systems include production costs, packaging and traffic safety. Innovations concern both product and development process e.g. combined virtual engineering and Hardware-in-the-loop testing. Three Steer-by-wire systems are discussed: a steering system simulator used as a driving laboratory, a side-stick system for...