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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Ph.D. Thesis Defense Announcement
Longitudinal Control For Self-driving Cars Based on Traffic Flow Considerations: Theory, Design, and Experiments
Hao Zhou
Dr. Jorge Laval
Dr. Guanghui Lan (ISYE), Dr. Patricia Mokhtarian (CEE), Dr. Srinivas Peeta (CEE), and Dr. Danjue Chen
Date & Time: Thursday, July 21st, 2022 at 10:00 AM (EST)
Location: SEB 122 / Zoom Meeting ID: 401 073 2547
Self-driving cars are around the corner, quite literally. As the industry is spending most efforts on improving safety in corner cases, the impacts of autonomous vehicles (AVs) on traffic congestion are overlooked, possibly due to a lack of regulation, as a result, current adaptive cruise control (ACC) will exacerbate congestion.
This dissertation addresses this research gap between self-driving and congestion. It develops new theories, algorithms, and experimental methods for ACC by incorporating traffic flow knowledge. The major findings include the following: i) identification of the research gap that existing datasets and learning methods in the self-driving industry have not well accounted for AVs' impact on traffic congestion, ii) significance of low-level control to string stability under ACC, which has been overlooked so far, iii) incorporation of driver relaxation into commercially-available ACC systems, which proves to be efficient in reducing lane-changing disruptions, iv) a family of novel model predictive controllers (MPCs) providing a simple and elegant solution to string stable ACCs without prediction needs, and v) measurement of the acceleration/deceleration constraints from commercial ACC vehicles, which may restrict string stability. Most of the findings in this dissertation are verified using commercially-available ACC vehicles. The proposed designs are also ready for practical implementation.
