Rule-Based Guidance for Vehicle Highway Driving in the Presence of Uncertainty

The principal objective of this research is to study the feasibility of a real-time, rule-based guidance system for an automobile on a limited-access highway. The inputs to the system are parameters describing the traffic situation, road geometry, vehicle state, and a driver selected goal. The output of the system consists of guidance parameters that command control logic governing the throttle, steering angle, and brakes. During our past research, a dynamic expert system accomplished this guidance task under the assumption that all inputs were available deterministically, i.e., without error. This paper investigates the types and effects of uncertainties encountered in a more realistic environment, and it proposes a stochastic methodology to extend the expert system to handle information that is known only in a probabilistic way.