Longitudinal Inter-Vehicle Distance Control of Autonomous Vehicle Platoons Subjected to Internal and External Disturbances

Alex Gunagwera,Aydın Tarık Zengi̇n

doi:10.17694/bajece.1017623

Abstract

The idea of autonomous vehicle platoons presents a variety of social, economic, and safety benefits to the transportation industry. However, implementing and deploying autonomous vehicle platoons is still a challenge. In this paper, we present a PID-based computationally cost-efficient controller to aid in the longitudinal control of the inter-vehicle distance between successive platoon members. The proposed approach is facilitated by inter-vehicle communication. The algorithm was implemented using the Robotics Operating System and Gazebo simulation environment. In order to evaluate the performance and applicability of the proposed approach, meticulous simulations under numerous scenarios were performed using 3D vehicle models so as to mimic the real world. The algorithm successfully maintains the longitudinal inter-vehicle distance within the desired range, ensures that no collisions occur among platoon members, and preserves the platoon formation.

Highlights

AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE PLATOONS (AVPs) is a trending multidisciplinary topic nowadays attracting attention from researchers, practitioners, and governmental bodies all over the world
We provide a computationally less demanding longitudinal inter-vehicle distance control algorithm for a platoon of autonomous vehicles that only requires that vehicles be equipped with Global Positioning System (GPS) sensors and have a connection to Wi-Fi
After the transient response to the Leader vehicle’s acceleration, the standard deviation of the inter-vehicle distance error was kept under 14.7% of the desired inter vehicle distance throughout the entire simulation period for all the scenarios

Summary

Introduction

AUTONOMOUS VEHICLE PLATOONS (AVPs) is a trending multidisciplinary topic nowadays attracting attention from researchers, practitioners, and governmental bodies all over the world. Owing to the multidisciplinary nature of AVPs, a multitude of work has been done pertaining to AVPs; their control, analysis, deployment to mention but a few. Work from areas such as control and analysis, the communication industry, and energy department have contributed significant work to the enhancement of AVP applications. The cruise control model proposed by [5] was implemented in MATLAB SIMULINK. They used the velocity and intervehicle distance deviation as inputs to their controller

Results

Discussion

Conclusion