Integration of optimal maneuver prediction in active safety control systems: Considerations on driving safety improvements

Traditional active safety systems in automotive industry use the vehicle current state and additional optional measurements to plan their intervention. In general, the computation of the most convenient action to undertake in order to guarantee a safe driving is performed without any reference to what the optimal maneuver, predicted on the basis of the vehicle current state and future road geometry/conditions, should be. In this paper, we explore the possible benefits in terms of stability and driving safety that can be attained by including an optimal maneuver prediction in an active safety control system that shares the control authority with the driver. Considerations about possible advantages coming from the adoption of the proposed solution are based on some preliminary results obtained with a driving simulator.