Prototype model car design for vehicle platooning

The paper presents a new prototype model car design devoted to provide a better study and research of the control techniques and navigation algorithms employed within vehicle platooning. The prototype car has a modular design and is equipped with various sensors. All the car parts were designed in a 3D CAD application and 3D printed. The embedded application designed to control the car behavior is developed in compliance with the FreeRTOS real-time operating system. The embedded system was designed to be highly customizable and is composed of a main board with a dsPIC33 microcontroller and an optional secondary one, namely STM32F3DISCOVERY board. The latest can implement a more powerful platoon controller whilst freeing the main board of this task.