Emergency Autonomous Vehicle Guidance Under Steering Loss

The autonomous vehicle guidance needs a steering system which is able to handle the lateral dynamics and a throttle/braking system to handle the longitudinal dynamics. However, a failure in the steering system leads the vehicle in dangerous situation. In order to manage this situation, an emergency guidance control architecture aims to guide and stop the vehicle in a safe area is proposed here. To that end, an emergency guidance controller (EGC) is developed to ensure the lateral guidance as well as the longitudinal guidance using braking torques. Since the same actuators (brakes) are employed for both control objectives a managing mechanism is proposed. Finally, simulation tests are carried out to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.