Longitudinal and lateral control in automated highway systems: Their past, present and future

Abstract

Due to the increase in road transportation by 35% over the last years in Europe it is essential to find solutions to optimize highway traffic. Therefore, several projects involving automated highway systems were initiated. In these systems, the longitudinal and lateral controls enable (with the help of other components) vehicles to be coupled electronically to form a platoon. Here, just the first vehicle is driven actively and the following vehicles are controlled automatically. Several projects were initiated to develop systems for different environments (i.e. Urban, Motorway). However, the developed techniques still are limited in their application range and e.g. cannot be applied in unstructured environment (i.e. rural or dirty areas). Furthermore, they were not tested for many different heterogeneous vehicles like trucks or passenger cars. This paper presents the past and present of automated highway systems and discusses solutions for future developments, e.g. how existing technologies can be adapted for a wider application range. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.