A Safety and Comfort Lane Change for Sportive Highly Automated Driving Truck

The major goal of this master thesis is to improve truck safety and comfort during lane change manoeuvres. This thesis focuses on the scenario of the driver doing sports exercises inside the cabin when the vehicle is driving automatically on a highway. This topic is one of the foci of the international GlobalDrive project from Technical University of Munich, which aims at sports exercises inside highly automated driving truck cabin by 2030. Using a special chair, drivers are able to do different types of exercises in the cabin. However, the acceleration, deceleration and jerk of normal highly automated vehicles can hardly satisfy the safety and comfort requirements for sports exercises, especially during lane changes. It is very difficult for the driver to keep balance when the lateral or longitudinal jerk and acceleration reach a certain level. In order to provide a suitable environment for exercises, a multi-level control architecture has been designed to satisfy the safety and comfort requirements from an ergonomics aspect. The proposed control scheme will make it easier for the driver to keep balance. Prevention of rollover is included in the architecture, while a Cruise Control (CC)-Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC)-Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) strategy is responsible for the longitudinal safety of the truck. Simulations in realistic and safety-critical scenarios show the effectiveness of the approach.