Vehicles Platooning in Urban Environments: Integrated Consensus-based Longitudinal Control with Gap Closure Maneuvering and Collision Avoidance Capabilities

This paper proposes a distributed longitudinal controller for car-like vehicles platooning that travel in an urban environment. The presented control strategy combines the platoon maintaining, gap closure, and collision avoidance functionality into a unified control law. A consensus-based controller designed in the path coordinates is the basis of the proposed control strategy and its role is to achieve position and velocity consensus among the platoon members taking into consideration the nature of the motion in an urban environment. For platoon creation, gap closure scenario is highly recommended for achieving a fast convergence of the platoon. For that, an algorithm is proposed to adjust the controller parameters online. A longitudinal collision between followers can occur due to several circumstances. Therefore, the proposed control strategy considers the assurance of collision avoidance by the guarantee of a minimum safe inter-vehicle distance. Convergence of the proposed algorithm is proved in the different modes of operations. Finally, studies are conducted to demonstrate and validate the efficiency of the proposed control strategy under different driving conditions. To better emulate a realistic setup, the controller is tested by an implementation of the car-like vehicles platoon in a vehicular mobility simulator called ICARS, which considers the real vehicle dynamics and other platooning staff in urban environments.