A cooperative lane change approach for heterogeneous platoons under different communication topologies

Abstract

To improve the platoon's passability and traffic efficiency, a cooperative lane change approach is proposed when the platoon encounters a slow obstacle vehicle ahead in this paper. The algorithm is designed for the heterogeneous platoon, that is, the vehicles are dynamically decoupled and have different parameters. The vehicles in the platoon can have different communication topologies. To complete the lane change process quickly, all vehicles in the platoon perform simultaneously. The approach is mainly divided into two parts: trajectory planning and cooperative control. In the trajectory planning part, combined with the polynomial method and the optimization method, the leading vehicle plans an optimal lane change trajectory according to its own states and the obstacle vehicle's states. A distributed model predictive control algorithm is designed in the cooperative control part to meet the requirement that all vehicles should change lanes simultaneously. Besides, the sufficient conditions to achieve the asymptotic stability are also given, and the simulation results can show the effectiveness of the algorithm.