THE APPLICATION OF REFERENCE-PATH CONTROL TO VEHICLE PLATOONS

Abstract

A new algorithm for the control of vehicle platooning is proposed and tested on a robot-soccer test bed.We considered decentralized platooning, i.e., a virtual train of vehicles, where each vehicle is autonomous and decides on its motion based on its own perceptions.The platooning vehicles have non-holonomic constraints.The following vehicle only has information about its own orientation and about its distance and azimuth to the leading vehicle.Its position is determined using odometry and a compass.The reference position and the orientation of the following vehicle are determined by the estimated path of the leading vehicle in a parametric polynominal form.The parameters of the polynominals are determined using the least-squares method.This parametric reference path is also used to determine the feed-forward part of the applied control algorithm.The feed-back control consists of a state controller with three inputs: the longitudinal and lateral position errors and the orientation error.The results of the experiments demonstrate the applicability of the proposed algorithm for vehicle platoons.