Model Predictive Control for Autonomous Vehicles with Speed Profile Shaping

In recent years, automatic driving has been widely studied which is expected to promote reduction of traffic accidents. Focusing on velocity control, it is sometimes required to decelerate greatly to prevent collision with other vehicles. On the other hand, excessive acceleration or deceleration is undesirable to provide comfortable ride for passengers. This paper presents a novel method to reshape the profile of vehicle velocity based on model predictive control. Introducing combined hard and soft constraints, excessive and sudden acceleration is suppressed while a collision with other vehicles is prevented. The advantage of the proposed method is verified through a numerical simulation supposing a practical situation where an another vehicle cuts in the front space of the controlled vehicle. It is shown that the proposed method properly shapes the acceleration profile so that it adapts to such situations.