With the advent of autonomous driving into mobility industry, passenger safety is of paramount importance. Electronic Stability Control (ESC) has been widely employed as an active safety feature in most of the modern cars, ESC is significantly based on differential braking, steer by wire or active torque distribution to prevent the vehicle from going off-course. However, ESC is limited to the discretion of the driver. Thus, the objective of this paper is to improve functionalities of ESC by adding sensor detection-based algorithm for collision avoidance.
The subject vehicle is installed with an existing default ESC & ABS system along with two range tracking sensors at front and rear and two blind spot detection sensors. The algorithm for collision avoidance has been tested in CarSim 2021.1.
The procedure is tuned on different complex highway driving scenarios where a crate falls off from a traffic vehicle moving ahead of the subject vehicle along with various combination of traffic vehicles behind and in the adjacent lanes of the subject vehicle, based on detection of the sensors the controller decides to either brake or steer the subject vehicle to the adjacent lane to avoid collision. A threshold limit of 20 m is defined for the activation of collision avoidance system and accordingly a steering torque of 10 Nm is applied for corrective actions. Consequently, the lane departure controller maintains the lane alignment of the vehicle. Thus, by adding collision avoidance algorithm the functionalities of ESC can be increased to avoid accidents.