Lateral Vehicle Following in a Cooperative Vehicle Platooning Application

Abstract

Lateral control in the absence of lane markings is an essential safety fallback for an autonomous vehicle in cooperative driving applications. Point following control is one such solutions for lateral control. However, it suffers from corner cutting and severe disturbance amplification throughout the platoon. In this paper, a new model for controller synthesis is proposed which supports including the error induced by the road curvature in the communication between two vehicles. This enables the trailing vehicle to deduce the actual road error states, which negates steady-state corner cutting if these errors are controlled to zero. To demonstrate the benefits of this new control model, an control framework is used to design a lateral controller which minimizes the lateral overshoot of the vehicles during transient maneuvering. The proposed approach has been evaluated using numerical simulations. Simulation results show that the lateral overshoot can be reduced by a factor 10 with respect to existing lateral control solutions.