Trajectory Planning and Control for Drifting Turn-Around Maneuvers in Unavoidable Collisions Within V2I-Based Intelligent Transportation Systems

Drifting turn-around (DTA) is an effective strategy for mitigating impact damage in unavoidable collisions by ensuring that the vehicle’s rear end absorbs the impact. This paper presents a novel trajectory planning and tracking approach to achieve DTA for intelligent vehicles, leveraging environmental perception data synthesized via a Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication framework. The control inputs include both front and rear steering angles as well as the driving or braking torques of all four wheels, resulting in a six-dimensional control space. The high dimensionality of the trajectory planning problem poses significant challenges for conventional inverse model and optimization techniques, which are widely used in existing studies. To address this complexity, dimensionality reduction is critical for effectively formulating the problem within an optimal control problem (OCP) framework. Several strategies are employed to achieve this, including a comprehensive analysis of the reachable tyre force regions, a control allocator that decouples the DTA maneuver into distinct moving and drifting phases, and the design of a dedicated drifting controller. Additionally, embedding the controller within the vehicle dynamics model in the OCP provides an effective approach to managing the high-dimensional decision variables. By integrating these components, the problem is ultimately reduced to a single dimension, enabling efficient computation. The planned trajectory coherents with vehicle’s drifting characteristics. The sensitivity of the control allocator and drifting controller parameters is analyzed. A fail-safe fallback mechanism is also integrated to ensure a secure exit from the DTA maneuver when necessary. Furthermore, a path-tracking controller is also developed. The proposed method is validated through simulations, demonstrating its effectiveness in enabling DTA and enhancing vehicle safety in unavoidable collision scenarios.