Combined Longitudinal and Lateral Control of Vehicle Platoons

With the development of intelligent and electrified vehicle, more and more researches on automated drive are put forward in recent years. This paper presents the controller which combines the trajectory tracking control and adaptive cruise control for realizing lateral and longitudinal control for a mini-vehicle platoon. A decoupled controller for lateral and longitudinal control is designed to keep the platoon stable. A lateral control system for trajectory tracking is proposed, which consists of a desired heading error generator based on vehicle-road kinematic relation and a feedback control system using robust PID controller based on vehicle-road dynamics model. A longitudinal control system designed for adaptive cruise control is established to achieve desired inter-vehicular distance. To validate the effect of the control system, simulations in two scenarios are conducted, and the experiment based on the mini-vehicle platform is designed. The simulation and experiment results show that vehicle platooning could achieve string stability while driving along trajectory at a low velocity.