Look ahead tracking controllers for integrated longitudinal and lateral control of vehicle platoons
1 This chapter presents a novel look ahead concept for combined longitudinal and lateral vehicle following control for a car like platoon. A nonlinear controller structure, which is based on Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) is designed for the lateral and longitudinal direction. For practical implementation and cost efficiency, a preceding vehicle look ahead approach is considered since it utilizes the already available information (such as preceding vehicle position, orientation, and velocity) from radar and V2V communication. However, due to the position control in the look ahead approach, the follower vehicle may cut corners. To overcome this problem, the look ahead is extended to a point perpendicular to the direction of the preceding vehicle, which can be viewed as a virtual preceding vehicle tracking objective. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the designed controller with the extended look ahead approach, simulations are performed and further validated with experiments on a mobile robot platform. The results prove the effectiveness of the extended look ahead approach.