Lateral Control Method of the Follower Vehicle in Local Decentralized Platooning

Vehicle platooning is an innovative technology for intelligent transportation systems. Each vehicle in the platoon is required to autonomously follow its front vehicle’s path unconditionally and accurately. Vehicle platooning based on global decentralized approaches relies on accurate and robust global positioning and reliable communication. However, high-precision global localization needs to be limited to a known area and communications cause problems such as security attacks. Considering the above factors, local decentralized approach for vehicle platooning is investigated as they do not rely on any infrastructure such as global localization and communications. The essential task of a follower vehicle in the platoon is to follow the path of its leader vehicle. In this paper, a path following method in this situation is developed to keep good track of the leader ’s path. A lidar is installed on the follower vehicles to measure the position and heading information the leader. A lateral control algorithm based on considering both the position and heading of the leader has been developed and verified on a three-vehicle platoon. The experiment results have shown more stable and smaller lateral error of the proposed method comparing to pure pursuit method. Moreover, the error of the heading angle has also been improved significantly on a crossing route.