Cautious Highway Pilot

Merging on highways is known as a potentially critical situation that can result in significant traffic disturbances or even accident risks. In practice, informal cooperation between vehicles on the main lane and those merging is very common and essential. This cooperation should be explicitly included in the automated driving function, even if the other vehicles are not automated or if V2V communication is not available. Practically, this implies extending a highway pilot system to incorporate an additional feature triggered by the detection of an entering vehicle in order to preserve the entrance gap while not endangering the following vehicles and minimizing the risk of congestion. This extension is only relevant when a merging vehicle is detected; otherwise, the classic formulation of the highway pilot can be used. To this end, we design the highway pilot using an MPC formulation and analyze its impact on traffic participants.