A global decentralized control strategy for urban vehicle platooning using monocular vision and a laser rangefinder

To address traffic saturation in cities, new ldquourban transportation systemsrdquo, based on electric vehicles in free-access, are in developing. One necessary functionality of such systems is their ability to move in a platoon fashion. A global decentralized platoon control strategy, supported by inter-vehicle communications, is addressed in this paper, relying on nonlinear control techniques. The main interest in a global approach is that servoing error accumulation can be avoided, whatever the platoon length. However, absolute vehicle localization is then required. In urban applications, cameras are realistic sensors, but localization is supplied in a 3D visual virtual world, slightly distorted w.r.t. the actual metric one. To enable accurate guidance, local corrections to the visual world are here computed from the data supplied by a laser rangefinder mounted on the second vehicle, and then shared with the whole platoon. Full-scale experiments demonstrate the performance of the proposed approach.