Guidance and Control System for Platoon of Autonomous Mobile Robots

摘要

This paper presents a concept of platoon movement of autonomous vehicles (smart cars). Autonomous vehicles have ACC (adaptive or advanced cruise control) system also called ICC (intelligent cruise control) or AICC (adaptive intelligent cruise control) system. These vehicles are suitable to follow other vehicles on desired distance and to be organized in platoons. To be able to do research to the control and stability of an AGV (automated guided vehicles) string, a car-following model is being determined. To do this, first a single vehicle is modelled and since all cars in the platoon have the same dynamics, the single vehicle model is copied ten times to form model of platoon (string) with ten vehicles. To control this string, equal PID (proportional-integral-derivative) controllers are applied to all vehicles, except the leading vehicle. These controllers try to keep the headway distance as constant as possible and the velocity between subsequent vehicles error small. For control of vehicle with nonlinear dynamics combination of feedforward control and feedback control approach is used. Feedforward control is based on inverse model of nominal dynamics of the vehicle, and feedback PID control is designed on base of linearized model of the vehicle. For simulation and analysis of vehicle and platoon of vehicles Matlab/Simulink models are designed. Simulation results, discussions and conclusions are given at the end of the paper.