An integrated longitudinal and lateral control of vehicle platoons

This paper proposes an integrated longitudinal and lateral control scheme for a vehicle platoon with the predecessor-leader communication topology. Both longitudinal and lateral dynamics are established, where the lateral dynamics considers the influence of variance of the longitudinal velocity. The decoupled longitudinal and lateral controllers are designed, respectively. The longitudinal controller adopts the distributed model predictive control algorithm, which regulates the following vehicles to track the longitudinal velocity of the leading vehicle and to keep the inter-vehicle desired spacing. Both the recursive feasibility of optimization problem and the asymptotic consensus of vehicle platoons are analyzed. Furthermore, the lateral controller adopts a feedforward and robust feedback control strategy to track the reference path without offset of the lateral position error. Simulation results in joint of MATLAB/Simulink and TruckSim verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.