Using monocular visual SLAM to manually convoy a fleet of automatic urban vehicles

This paper addresses platooning navigation as part of new transportation services emerging nowadays in urban areas. Platooning formation is ensured using a global decentralized control strategy supported by inter-vehicle communications. A large motion flexibility is achieved according to a manual guidance mode, i.e. the path to follow is inferred online from the motion of the manually driven first vehicle. For this purpose, a visual SLAM algorithm that relies on monocular vision is run on the lead vehicle and coupled with a trajectory creation procedure. Both the map and trajectory updates are shared online with the following vehicles and permit them to derive their absolute location with respect to a common reference trajectory from their current camera image. Full-scale experiments with two urban vehicles demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach.