Design and Experiments of Automatic Vehicle Platoon Management with Connected Autonomous Vehicles in Mixed Traffic

The algorithm of automatic platoon management has been proposed for connected autonomous vehicles with mixed traffic. The Level 4 autonomous vehicles are designed to be able to automatically join a platoon mode when a preceding one with wireless communication equipped human-driven or autonomous vehicle is available. These vehicles are pre-authorized as they are connected with the operation cloud. Identification of the preceding vehicle is carried out by fusion of the local sensor detection and wireless communication with limited information. Moreover, the platoon can be automatically dissolved when the follower's route is separated from the preceding one. Then, a two-layer trajectory planner is proposed to realize this automatic platoon mode. In the first layer, the route planner will not consider the vehicle as an obstacle. Thus, if the preceding one stops, the Level 4 autonomous follower stops behind as well. In the second layer, however, the velocity planner takes all the surrounding objects into account and generates its velocity profile as a self-driving vehicle, such that it avoids large acceleration to maintain a desired inter-vehicle distance with no collision. Simulation and experiments clearly show the connected autonomous vehicles can properly follow in the platoon to avoid unnecessary overtake, and to keep comfort and safe 90° turns around the intersection.