Energy Efficient Autopilot: Energy efficient driving in dynamic environment

For almost a decade, energy efficient driving occupies the attention of researchers and engineers. Still the consideration of overtaking in eco-driving didn’t receive a lot of attention yet. In this work energy efficient driving of (semi)autonomous electric vehicles operating in environment with other traffic participants is studied. Neglecting the constraints imposed from the surrounding traffic, when generating an energy optimal speed trajectory may lead to trajectories which are not attainable in real driving situation which may eventually lead to bigger energy consumption and low driver acceptance. An existing approach, which considers other traffic participants and optimizes the overtaking problem, modifies a previously generated unconstrained trajectory to satisfy constraints arisen from surrounding traffic. In contrast to this, the proposed approach incorporates a leading vehicle’s motion as constraint in original optimal control problem. By this approach the generated trajectory is globally optimal. Besides that, this approach considers overtaking decision making and leaves possibility to not overtake at all.