Should collision avoidance systems use yaw stabilization?

Abstract

Due to historical reasons or system development aspects, many high-level control tasks in vehicles are performed by underlying low-level controllers. This separation of concerns provides reliable systems, but potentially degrades the performance compared to centralized control. Performance losses are acceptable for most control tasks, but for collision avoidance systems one should not compromise on safety. We investigate the performance loss for collision avoidance systems when an underlying yaw stabilization controller is used, which can be found in many modern vehicles under various product names, such as electronic stability control (ESC). Since electronic stability control differs from vehicle to vehicle, we use an idealized controller that performs better than or equally well as an actual realization. It is shown that central control concepts bypassing the yaw stabilization perform better than a hypothetical controller embedded with the idealized yaw stabilization. We also provide a measure for the performance loss, which should support the decision for or against the use of yaw stabilization in collision avoidance systems.