Longitudinal and lateral control of vehicle platoons: A unifying framework to prevent corner cutting

The formation of platoons, where groups of vehicles follow each other at close distances, has the potential to increase road capacity. In this paper, a decentralized control approach is presented that extends the well-known constant headway vehicle following approach to the two-dimensional case, i.e., lateral control is included in addition to the longitudinal control. The presented control scheme employs a direct vehicle-following approach where each vehicle in the platoon is responsible for following the directly preceding vehicle according to a nonlinear spacing policy. The proposed spacing policy is motivated by an approximation of a delay-based spacing policy and results in a generalization of the constant-headway spacing policy to the two-dimensional case. By input–output linearization, necessary and sufficient conditions for the tracking of the nonlinear spacing policy are obtained, which motivate the synthesis of the lateral and longitudinal controllers of each vehicle in the platoon. By deriving an internal state representation of the follower vehicle and showing input-to-state stability, the internal dynamics for each leader–follower subsystem are shown to be well-behaved. Furthermore, the spacing policy results in string-stable behavior of the platoon when driving in the longitudinal direction. The results are illustrated by a simulation.