Lateral control of vehicle platoons with on-board sensing and inter-vehicle communication

This paper presents a lateral control strategy for a platoon of vehicles which utilises only data which can realistically be measured by each vehicle, augmented with Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC). The control problem resembles those which exist for longitudinal control and this introduces the challenge of estimating a vehicles lateral position and velocity when direct measurement is not possible (due to lane markings being obscured by a preceding vehicle). It is shown that the associated robust controller, which we propose, exhibits string stability in the presence of sensor and actuation delays and a high fidelity simulation is conducted to verify this.