Lateral Control of Vehicle Platoons

Vehicle platoons are fully automated vehicles driving in close proximity of each other, where both distance keeping and steering is under automatic control. This paper is aiming at a variant of vehicle platoons, where the lateral control is using forward looking sensors, i.e. camera, radar. Such a system solution implies that the vehicle dynamics are coupled together laterally, in contrast to the classical look-down solutions. For such a platoon, lateral string stability is an important property that the controller needs to guarantee. This article proposes a method for designing such a distributed controller. It also examines the effect of model uncertainties on the lateral string stability of the platoon for the proposed method.