Identifying Modes of Intent from Driver Behaviors in Dynamic Environments

In light of growing attention of intelligent vehicle systems, we propose developing a driver model that uses a hybrid system formulation to capture the intent of the driver. This model hopes to capture human driving behavior in a way that can be utilized by semi- and fully autonomous systems in heterogeneous environments. We consider a discrete set of high level goals or intent modes, that is designed to encompass the decision making process of the human. A driver model is derived using a dataset of lane changes collected in a realistic driving simulator, in which the driver actively labels data to give us insight into her intent. By building the labeled dataset, we are able to utilize classification tools to build the driver model using features of based on her perception of the environment, and achieve high accuracy in identifying driver intent. Multiple algorithms are presented and compared on the dataset, and a comparison of the varying behaviors between drivers is drawn. Using this modeling methodology, we present a model that can be used to assess driver behaviors and to develop human-inspired safety metrics that can be utilized in intelligent vehicular systems.Comment: Submitted to ITSC 201

The asymptotic equivalence of fixed heat flux and fixed temperature thermal boundary conditions for rapidly rotating convection

The influence of fixed temperature and fixed heat flux thermal boundary conditions on rapidly rotating convection in the plane layer geometry is investigated for the case of stress-free mechanical boundary conditions. It is shown that whereas the leading order system satisfies fixed temperature boundary conditions implicitly, a double boundary layer structure is necessary to satisfy the fixed heat flux thermal boundary conditions. The boundary layers consist of a classical Ekman layer adjacent to the solid boundaries that adjust viscous stresses to zero, and a layer in thermal wind balance just outside the Ekman layers adjusts the temperature such that the fixed heat flux thermal boundary conditions are satisfied. The influence of these boundary layers on the interior geostrophically balanced convection is shown to be asymptotically weak, however. Upon defining a simple rescaling of the thermal variables, the leading order reduced system of governing equations are therefore equivalent for both boundary conditions. These results imply that any horizontal thermal variation along the boundaries that varies on the scale of the convection has no leading order influence on the interior convection