Model based controller synthesis using reachability analysis that guarantees the safety of autonomous vehicles in a convoy

In this paper, an on-line model-based controller synthesis method using reachability analysis for convoying autonomous vehicles is proposed. At every time sample, the reachable occupation set of the vehicle under the physical constraints are computed. Then the maximal feasible control input sequence is obtained such that the reachable occupation set is not overlapped with the unsafe region defined by the predicted occupation set of the target vehicle. The proposed method is tested for a scenario where three vehicles are in a convoy and the fourth vehicle interferes with the formation by merging in. The simulation results show that the synthesized controller guarantees the safety of autonomous vehicles while also satisfying both state and input constraints.