Safe Cooperative Intersection of Autonomous and Connected Robots: Trajectory and Schedule Optimization

Conventional intersection managements, such as signalized intersections, may not necessarily be the optimal strategies when it comes to connected and automated vehicles (CAV) environment. Cooperative intersection management (CIM) is tailored for CAVs aiming at replacing the conventional traffic control strategies. This paper focuses on the safety constraint in the case of conflicting movements. The constraint is needed for both optimization: robot trajectory (speed profile) and sequence (which robot crosses the intersection first, which is the second one and so on). The main objective is to safely minimize the lost time between two conflicting robots while saving energy. The paper studies the safety condition of the cyber-physical system and derives the optimal control point that saves time. Quadratic optimization is used to derive the speed trajectory of the robot in order to save energy. Simulations show that the proposed approach allows safe and efficient cooperative intersection.