A unified framework of the automated lane centering/changing control for motion smoothness adaptation

This paper describes an automated lane centering/changing control algorithm that was developed at General Motors Research and Development. Over the past few decades, there have been numerous studies in the autonomous vehicle motion control. These studies typically focused on improving the control accuracy of the autonomous driving vehicles. In addition to the control accuracy, driver/passenger comfort is also an important performance measure of the system. As an extension of authors' prior study, this paper further considers vehicle motion control to provide driver/passenger comfort based on the adjustment of the lane change maneuvering time in various traffic situations. While defining the driver/passenger comfort level is a human factor study topic, this paper proposes a framework to integrate the motion smoothness into the existing lane centering/changing control problem. The proposed algorithm is capable of providing smooth and aggressive lane change maneuvers according to traffic situation and driver preference. Several simulation results as well as on-road vehicle test results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.