Braking Strategy for an Autonomous Vehicle in a Mixed Traffic Scenario

During the early deployment phase of autonomous vehicles, autonomous vehicles will share roads with conventional manually driven vehicles. They will be required to adjust their driving dynamically taking into account not only preceding but also following conventional manually driven vehicles. This paper addresses the challenges of adaptive braking to avoid front-end and rear-end collisions, where an autonomous vehicle is followed by a conventional manually driven vehicle. We illustrate via simulations the consequences of independent braking in terms of collisions, on both autonomous and conventional vehicles, and propose an adaptive braking strategy for autonomous vehicles to coordinate with conventional manually driven vehicles to avoid front and rear-end collisions.