Decentralized local approach for lateral control of platoons

Abstract

Abstract — This paper deals with the platooning problem: we aim to steer a train of vehicles along an unknown path followed by the first vehicle. Many techniques have been developed in this field, but they presented several drawbacks. On one side, a centralised control requires communication between vehicles: any data loss may prevent the correct behaviour of the platoon. On the other side, a decentralised control is more robust as each vehicle is autonomous, but path tracking is less precise (the followers may deviate and cut corners). This paper studies the lateral control and proposes a decen-tralised local approach, to improve the platooning performance especially along corners. Each robot uses its perceptions to compute the position of its preceding vehicle, and memorises it to form a path. It then tends to follow this path instead of trying to reach the preceding vehicle’s position. In other terms, the lateral controller will have as input a position on this path which is closer than the preceding vehicle’s position. This reduces the lateral error in the platoon motion. I.