Lateral Control of Heavy-Duty Vehicle Platoons Using Model-Based Predictive Control1

Abstract

Heavy-duty vehicle platoons are a possible future form of organising goods traffic. Only the leading vehicle is manually driven while all following vehicles are automatically controlled in longitudinal and lateral direction. The platoon under consideration possesses a wireless vehicle-to-vehicle communication and therefore permits the propagation of sensor information gathered in the leading vehicle. This enables the following vehicles to construct lateral position reference trajectories set by the leading vehicle as well as disturbance trajectories indicating the curvature of the road ahead of the following vehicles’ current position. To use this information best in the lateral control of the following vehicles a model-based predictive control concept is investigated and implemented for experimental testing. The work presented was partly conducted in the course of the project KONVOI at RWTH Aachen University.