Potential field-based hierarchical adaptive cruise control for semi-autonomous electric vehicle

Adaptive cruise control, as a driver assistant system for vehicles, can adjust the vehicle speed to keep the appropriate distance from other vehicles, which highly increases the driving safety and driver's comfort. This paper presents hierarchical adaptive cruise control system that could balance the driver's expectation, collision risk, and ride comfort. In the adaptive cruise control structure, there are two controllers to achieve the function. The one is the upper controller which is established based on the model predictive control theory and used to calculate the desirable longitudinal acceleration. The collision risk is described by the Gaussian distribution. A quadratic cost function for model predictive control is formulated based on the potential field method through the contradictions between the tracking error, collision risk, and the longitudinal ride comfort. The other one is the lower optimal torque vectoring controller which is constructed based on the vehicle longitudinal dynamics. And it can generate the desired acceleration considering the anti-wheel slip limitations. Several simulations under different road conditions demonstrate that the proposed adaptive cruise control has significant performance on balancing the tracking ability, collision avoidance, ride comfort, and adhesion utilization. It also maintains vehicle stability for the complex road conditions.