Redundant manipulator techniques for path planning and control of a platoon of autonomous vehicles

An approach to real-time, decentralized trajectory generation for platoons of autonomous vehicles is developed from well-known control techniques for redundant robotic manipulators. The decentralized structure of this approach permits each vehicle to independently compute its trajectory in real-time using only locally generated information and low-bandwidth feedback generated by a system exogenous to the platoon. Our work is motivated by applications for which communications bandwidth is severely limited. The communication requirements for our decentralized trajectory generation approach are independent of the number of vehicles in the platoon. Thus permitting control and path-planning of very large platoons despite limited communications bandwidth.