Longitudinal and lateral servoing of vehicles in a platoon

This paper presents the PRAXITELE project which includes a vision technique for platoon driving of a fleet of homogeneous electric cars. These cars, under supervision from a central computer, will form a novel public transportation system now under development in France. In the first version of the system, the public cars are driven by their users but their operation will be automated in some instances when no-one is on board. For later versions, fully automated driving (with passengers) is considered on dedicated tracks and on low-traffic road networks at slower speed. The paper focuses on the vision and control techniques now being developed for the first version. We wish to be able to drive a "convoy" of empty public cars with only one driver (in the front car). This function is needed to pick up cars which have been abandoned in various locations and to redistribute them to appropriate locations. When one car has reached its destination, it can leave the platoon and parallelly park all by itself. This paper presents the platooning technique based on vision with a linear camera.