Enrique Onieva

Controller for Urban Intersections Based on Wireless Communications and Fuzzy Logic

A major research topic in intelligent transportation systems (ITSs) is the development of systems that will be capable of controlling the flow of vehicular traffic through crossroads, particularly in urban environments. This could significantly reduce traffic jams, since autonomous vehicles would be capable of calculating the optimal speed to maximize the number of cars driving through the intersection. We describe the use of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications to determine the position and speed of the vehicles in an environment around a crossroad. These data are used to estimate the intersection point, and a fuzzy controller then modifies the speed of the cars without right of way according to the speed of the car with right of way. Experimental tests conducted with two mass-produced cars on a real circuit at the facilities of the Instituto de Automa¿tica Industrial, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cienti¿ficas, Madrid, Spain, gave excellent results.

An Intelligent V2I-Based Traffic Management System

Vehicles equipped with intelligent systems designed to prevent accidents, such as collision warning systems (CWSs) or lane-keeping assistance (LKA), are now on the market. The next step in reducing road accidents is to coordinate such vehicles in advance not only to avoid collisions but to improve traffic flow as well. To this end, vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communications are essential to properly manage traffic situations. This paper describes the AUTOPIA approach toward an intelligent traffic management system based on V2I communications. A fuzzy-based control algorithm that takes into account each vehicles safe and comfortable distance and speed adjustment for collision avoidance and better traffic flow has been developed. The proposed solution was validated by an IEEE-802.11p-based communications study. The entire system showed good performance in testing in real-world scenarios, first by computer simulation and then with real vehicles.

Cascade Architecture for Lateral Control in Autonomous Vehicles

Research on intelligent transport systems (ITSs) is steadily leading to safer and more comfortable control for vehicles. Systems that permit longitudinal control have already been implemented in commercial vehicles, acting on throttle and brake. Nevertheless, lateral control applications are less common in the market. Since a too-sudden turn of the steering wheel can cause an accident in a few seconds, good speed and position control of the steering wheel is essential. We present here a new cascade control architecture based on fuzzy logic controllers that emulate a human drivers behavior. The control architecture was tested on a real vehicle at different vehicle speeds. The results showed the use of a straightforward and intuitive fuzzy controller to give good performance.

The 2009 Simulated Car Racing Championship

In this paper, we overview the 2009 Simulated Car Racing Championship-an event comprising three competitions held in association with the 2009 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC), the 2009 ACM Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), and the 2009 IEEE Symposium on Computational Intelligence and Games (CIG). First, we describe the competition regulations and the software framework. Then, the five best teams describe the methods of computational intelligence they used to develop their drivers and the lessons they learned from the participation in the championship. The organizers provide short summaries of the other competitors. Finally, we summarize the championship results, followed by a discussion about what the organizers learned about 1) the development of high-performing car racing controllers and 2) the organization of scientific competitions.

A modular parametric architecture for the TORCS racing engine

This paper presents our approach to TORCS Car Racing Competition 2009, it is based on a complete modular architecture capable of driving automatically a car along a track with or without oppents. The architecture is composed of five simple modules being each one responsible for a basic aspect of car driving. The modules control gear shiftings, steer movements and pedals positions by using of simple functions meanwhile the allowed speed in a certain track segment is managed by a simple TSK fuzzy system.

Golden ball: a novel meta-heuristic to solve combinatorial optimization problems based on soccer concepts

In this paper, a new multiple population based meta-heuristic to solve combinatorial optimization problems is introduced. This meta-heuristic is called Golden Ball (GB), and it is based on soccer concepts. To prove the quality of our technique, we compare its results with the results obtained by two different Genetic Algorithms (GA), and two Distributed Genetic Algorithms (DGA) applied to two well-known routing problems, the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP). These outcomes demonstrate that our new meta-heuristic performs better than the other techniques in comparison. We explain the reasons of this improvement.

Throttle and brake pedals automation for populated areas

Artificial intelligence techniques applied to control processes are particularly useful when the elements to be controlled are complex and can not be described by a linear model. A trade-off between performance and complexity is the main factor in the design of this kind of system. The use of fuzzy logic is specially indicated when trying to emulate such human control actions as driving a car. This paper presents a fuzzy system that cooperatively controls the throttle and brake pedals for automatic speed control up to 50km/h. It is thus appropriate for populated areas where driving involves constant speed changes, but within a range of low speeds because of traffic jams, road signs, traffic lights, etc. The system gets the current and desired speeds for the car and generates outputs to control the two pedals. It has been implemented in a real car, and tested in real road conditions, showing good speed control with smooth actions resulting in accelerations that are comfortable for the cars occupants.

Modularity, adaptability and evolution in the AUTOPIA architecture for control of autonomous vehicles

Computer systems to carry out control algorithms on autonomous vehicles have been developed in recent years. However, the advances in peripheral devices allow connecting the actuator controllers to the control system by means of standard communication links (USB, CAN, Ethernet…).The goal is to permit the use of standard computers. In this paper, we present the evolution of AUTOPIA architecture and its modularity and adaptability to move the old system based on ISA controller cards to a new system with Ethernet and CAN connected controllers. The results show a comparison between both systems and the improved performance of the new system.

A Hybrid Method for Short-Term Traffic Congestion Forecasting Using Genetic Algorithms and Cross Entropy

This paper presents a method of optimizing the elements of a hierarchy of fuzzy-rule-based systems (FRBSs). It is a hybridization of a genetic algorithm (GA) and the cross-entropy (CE) method, which is here called GACE. It is used to predict congestion in a 9-km-long stretch of the I5 freeway in California, with time horizons of 5, 15, and 30 min. A comparative study of different levels of hybridization in GACE is made. These range from a pure GA to a pure CE, passing through different weights for each of the combined techniques. The results prove that GACE is more accurate than GA or CE alone for predicting short-term traffic congestion.

A discrete firefly algorithm to solve a rich vehicle routing problem modelling a newspaper distribution system with recycling policy

A real-world newspaper distribution problem with recycling policy is tackled in this work. To meet all the complex restrictions contained in such a problem, it has been modeled as a rich vehicle routing problem, which can be more specifically considered as an asymmetric and clustered vehicle routing problem with simultaneous pickup and deliveries, variable costs and forbidden paths (AC-VRP-SPDVCFP). This is the first study of such a problem in the literature. For this reason, a benchmark composed by 15 instances has been also proposed. In the design of this benchmark, real geographical positions have been used, located in the province of Bizkaia, Spain. For the proper treatment of this AC-VRP-SPDVCFP, a discrete firefly algorithm (DFA) has been developed. This application is the first application of the firefly algorithm to any rich vehicle routing problem. To prove that the proposed DFA is a promising technique, its performance has been compared with two other well-known techniques: an evolutionary algorithm and an evolutionary simulated annealing. Our results have shown that the DFA has outperformed these two classic meta-heuristics.