Experimental Evaluation of an Adaptive Cruise Control and Cooperative Merging Concept

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental evaluation of a concept for platooning and cooperative merging of networked vehicles in case of an upcoming lane reduction. In order to test the platooning and merging concept, differential-driven robots are used. Low level path controllers are designed to guide the robots to a prescribed path on which the robots can be represented by linear models. Furthermore, a lane changing approach will be presented that maintains the longitudinal inter-robot distance while moving laterally to the other lane. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is discussed with experimental results.