Autonomous lateral following consideration for vehicle platoons

In this paper the problem of lateral control of vehicles operating in a platoon without the use of road infrastructure is analyzed. It is shown that the use of sensors that monitor the preceding vehicle´s relative lateral position is enough to achieve lateral control for a pair of vehicles, provided that certain limitations are taken into account. For a platoon of multiple vehicles, the lateral error propagation is a serious issue that can be solved if performance is compromised. The use of inter-vehicle communication is proposed in order to recover platoon stability and satisfactory performance. Experimental data and simulations for both passenger and tractor-semi-trailer vehicles illustrate the analytical results.