Autonomous Cars & ADAS: Complex Scenario Generation, Simulation and Evaluation of Collision Avoidance Systems

This thesis provides an overview of Autonomous Driving and ADAS, through the view point of automotive control systems, by implementing a test-bench to evaluate the performance of an autonomous car model in some critical driving scenarios and evaluating the performance of this system. First two chapters of this thesis provide an overview and some useful information about the concepts and technologies that are needed to develop these ideas. Consequently, the route that autonomous driving concept has already taken and what is expected to reach in the future, with regards to the standards, legislation and limits is discussed and presented. In the third chapter, concepts and technologies that are already mentioned, are taken into account to build up a model that would correspond to some specific simulations to test and evaluate the performance of an automated car. For implementation of this model, four main ADAS functions (ACC, LKA, LCA, AEB) based on Matlab pre-built models are merged into a test-bench and configured to obtain the best possible performance. Obviously, each of these individual systems are already available vastly in the market and being tested or used in several brand new cars. However, in the limited simulation systems such as Matlab-Simulink, each individual function is provided as a sample system to introduce the capabilities of Automated Driving toolbox; but when merging them together, there are a lot of issues that have been taken into account for this thesis, so that the overall system meets every single requirement of each system and also the whole system operates smoothly without losing the functionability of its single components. This has been done with in-depth study of each system and also using the available literature about these systems. Finally, by testing the system while implementing and passing lots of trials and errors, an optimized system has been reached to test the desired driving scenarios. Chapter 4 includes the simulations of the proposed scenarios with two configurations for the system which are used to differentiate between two cases of driving style, from which, configuration 2 is more defensive but shows a better overall performance than the other less conservative configuration 1. Results obtained through simulation of specific scenarios are concluded in two tables for both of the configurations, indicating safe zones for the use of implemented system. Again it is observed that configuration 2 is a more logical setting for this system and performs lane change and emergency braking in a more logical way. Obviously, performance of this system is evaluated according to some specific and limited considerations that were also considered in the design phase of this system. However, there would be a large number of cases that this system could not be able to handle situations. This is the usual characteristic of every system and this is why there is never an end to research in this area. To put in the nutshell, considering the limited time and simulation tools in this research, the obtained results are satisfying the expectations of the thesis topic. However, as this field of study is really vast, there would be further research in this area that would complete this system to work in more complex scenarios.