Longitudinal and lateral control of vehicle platoons using Laguerre-based and robust MPC with merge and exit maneuvers

Abstract

This paper addresses the longitudinal and lateral control of platooning vehicles with the objective of maintaining safe vehicular distance and accomplishing lateral maneuvers. For the longitudinal control, a two-layer controller is proposed. In the first step, feedback linearization transform the nonlinear longitudinal dynamics of vehicles to a linear one for which Laguerre-based Model predictive control (LMPC) is designed in the second layer. The objective function of LMPC includes safe vehicular distance and control effort under state and input constraints. The proposed controller using Laguerre orthonormal functions for input signal parametrization, achieves the desired platoon control and dramatically decreases computation time. For lateral control, a robust MPC is developed to track the reference path in maneuvers of merging a new vehicle to the platoon or exiting a vehicle from it. The road bump is considered a source of uncertainties and is modeled with a bounded additive disturbance. The proposed longitudinal and lateral controller is then used in a high-level control strategy to manage merge and exit maneuvers. Besides extensive simulation results to verify the efficiency of the proposed strategy, experimental evaluation using the hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test bench based on Raspberry Pi board and actual robots validated the plan’s viability in practice.