A global control strategy for urban vehicles platooning relying on nonlinear decoupling laws

To solve problems of traffic saturation in cities, new alternative \´\´urban transportation systems" are based on electric vehicles in free-access. One necessary functionality of such systems is their ability to move in a platoon fashion. Platooning of these automatic guided vehicles, relying on RTK-GPS sensors and inter-vehicles communication, is addressed in this paper. The developed control law is based on a global control strategy; actually, it can take into account all the platoon state, and not only the immediate previous vehicle state. Distance here is understood as difference of curvilinear abscissa along a reference trajectory. Relying on nonlinear control theory, lateral and longitudinal control are fully decoupled, and therefore addressed independently. To ensure passengers comfort, additional monitoring functions supervise our control system. Then, experiment, carried out with urban vehicles, and simulations of long platoon, are presented.