Abstract
Keywords - Vehicle Platoons, Longitudinal Control, Lateral Control, Linear Matrix Inequalities, Model-based Predictive ControlThis paper presents two control designs for heavy-duty truck platoons with constant spacings that focus on improved safety margins in longitudinal and lateral vehicle following. Both control concepts exploit the transmission of fused data on vehicle states among the platoon to minimize control errors and for collision avoidance to bound velocities or possible accelerations accounting for saturation effects. For longitudinal control LMI formulations are used to minimize upper bounds on the corresponding variables. The effects of communication failure are discussed and a longitudinal control design is developed that restores similar performance with only autonomously detected data. In the case of lateral vehicle guidance the generation of disturbance and reference trajectories is proposed using data of front vehicles to optimize the performance of followers by a model-based predictive control framework. The effectiveness of both control designs for longitudinal and lateral vehicle guidance is shown in simulations.