Autonomous lateral following consideration for vehicle platoons

In this paper the problem of lateral control of vehicles operating in a platoon without the use of road infrastructure is analyzed. It is shown that the use of sensors that monitor the preceding vehicle's relative lateral position is enough to achieve lateral control for a pair of vehicles, provided that certain limitations are taken into account. For a platoon of multiple vehicles, the lateral error propagation is a serious issue that can be solved if performance is compromised. The use of inter-vehicle communication is proposed in order to recover platoon stability and satisfactory performance. Experimental data and simulations for both passenger and tractor-semi-trailer vehicles illustrate the analytical results.