Homing Guidance of On-Ramp Vehicles for Safe Merging

We propose an automatic guidance concept in facilitating drivers/vehicles to safely merge into the main stream freeway traffic. A gap-tracking guidance law is developed for on-ramp vehicles during merging. This concept can be realized with completely vehicle-based sensors and devices and requires neither infrastructure support nor vehicle-to-vehicle communications. The effectiveness of the guidance law has been tested through computer simulations. This result will serve as a theoretical foundation for developing near-term semi-automatic driver assistance systems for easy and safe merging, as well as future automatic vehicle-merging controllers for fully automated vehicle-highway systems.