Trajectory Planning and Tracking for Cooperative Automated Vehicles in a Platoon

The main benefits of vehicle platooning are the following: reducing fuel consumption by decreasing air resistance and travel time, improving the comfort and people's safety, and shortening the inter-vehicle gap. In this paper, a control architecture for the lateral dynamics of the vehicles that travel in platoons is proposed. Firstly, a trajectory planner to ensure a safe path in the presence of static obstacles on the road is designed. Secondly, the trajectory generated by the planner is followed using a lateral predictive controller. Note that, only the trajectory planner of the leader is activated, whereas all the follower vehicles track the trajectory received from their relative leader. To exchange information regarding future estimates of the lateral trajectory, the vehicles in the platoon are connected using a vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication network.