Generic Convoying Functionality for Autonomous Vehicles in Unstructured Outdoor Environments

Autonomously following a leading vehicle is a major step towards fully autonomous vehicles. The contribution of this work consists in the development, implementation, and validation of two following modes: 1) Exact following: accurate compliance with the reference path. 2) Flexible following: tolerate deviation from the reference path in order to avoid obstacles. The proposed method can easily be integrated into existing frameworks for autonomous vehicles. Therefore our approach is flexible enough to be applied to a large variety of different vehicles. To demonstrate the feasibility of our approach an experimental validation is carried out on two autonomous vehicles with major differences in kinematics, weight, and size: A cross-country wheelchair and an off-road truck. Both exact and flexible following have been successfully demonstrated in unstructured outdoor environments.