Safety-extended Explicit MPC for Autonomous Truck Platooning on Varying Road Conditions

Abstract

Automotive platooning can significantly improve traffic safety and efficiency, but many control challenges need to be solved to function properly under realistic driving conditions. This paper proposes a novel multi-rate explicit model-predictive controller (eMPC) for safe autonomous distributed vehicle platooning in varying road friction conditions. A safety-augmented distributed predictive control formulation ensures safe vehicle spacing versus emergency braking of preceding vehicles given current friction estimates. This complex control problem is carefully formulated into an efficiently parametrized optimization problem realized as eMPC. The resulting platoon shows excellent performance in a complex vehicle dynamics co-simulation validation with low communication and computation demands.