Review of advanced road materials, structures, equipment, and detection technologies

As a vital and integral component of transportation infrastructure,pavement has a direct and tangible impact on socio-economic sustainability.In recent years,an influx of groundbreaking and state-of-the-art materials,structures,equipment,and detection technologies related to road engineering have continually and progressively emerged,reshaping the landscape of pavement systems.There is a pressing and growing need for a timely summarization of the current research status and a clear identification of future research directions in these advanced and evolving technologies.Therefore,Journal of Road Engineering has undertaken the significant initiative of introducing a comprehensive review paper with the overarching theme of“advanced road materials,structures,equipment,and detection technologies”.This extensive and insightful review meticulously gathers and synthesizes research findings from 39 distinguished scholars,all of whom are affiliated with 19 renowned universities or research institutions specializing in the diverse and multidimensional field of highway engineering.It covers the current state and anticipates future development directions in the four major and interconnected domains of road engineering:advanced road materials,advanced road structures and performance evaluation,advanced road construction equipment and technology,and advanced road detection and assessment technologies.

Structured road-oriented motion planning and tracking framework for active collision avoidance of autonomous vehicles

This paper proposes a novel motion planning and tracking framework based on improved artificial potential fields(APFs) and a lane change strategy to enhance the performance of the active collision avoidance systems of autonomous vehicles on structured roads. First, an improved APF-based hazard evaluation module, which is inspired by discrete optimization, is established to describe driving hazards in the Frenet-Serret coordinate. Next, a strategy for changing lane is developed in accordance with the characteristics of the gradient descent method(GDM). On the basis of the potential energy distribution of the target obstacle and road boundaries, GDM is utilized to generate the path for changing lane. In consideration of the safety threats of traffic participants, the effects of other obstacles on safety are taken as additional safety constraints when the lane-changing speed profile for ego vehicles is designed. Then, after being mapped into the Cartesian coordinate, the feasible trajectory is sent to the tracking layer, where a proportional-integral control and model predictive control(PI-MPC) based coordinated controller is applied. Lastly, several cases composed of different road geometrics and obstacles are tested to validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Results illustrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve active collision avoidance in complex traffic scenarios.