Abstract
Railway and inland water transportation will not be able to completely handle the predicted growth of freight transportation. A large extent of this demand will therefore have to be covered by road freight transportation – probably also resulting in an increase of accidents, higher noise and green house gas emissions and a higher number of traffic jams. In order to address these future challenges, the concept of truck platoons was investigated within the KONVOI project for the first time under real traffic conditions. Within the project four demonstrator trucks were built up and more than 3000 km were driven in public traffic with promising results. The present paper describes the build-up process of the demonstrator trucks taking the experimental vehicles of the Institute of Automotive Engineering Aachen (ika) as example. Special attention is given to the design of the longitudinal and lateral controllers developed by the Institute of Automatic Control Aachen (IRT). The longitudinal controller uses a non-linear state feedback with information from preceding vehicles. For the lateral controller two different approaches were investigated within the project: a structurally extended PID-based controller, which was designed by Open-Loop-Shaping, and a model-based predictive controller (MPC). The controllers were tested under realistic conditions and the achieved results are presented in detail
KEYWORDS – KONVOI, truck platooning, longitudinal control, lateral control, real traffic