Development and experimentation of an autonomous vehicle platoon for urban environments

Michel Null Parent (1) , Plamen Petrov (2) , Clément Boussard (1)

1 IMARA - Informatique, Mathématiques et Automatique pour la Route Automatisée
2 Faculty of Mechanical Engineering

This paper describes a control system for vehicle platoon which permits the ego vehicle to track the trajectory of the vehicle ahead with prescribed inter-vehicle distance. We consider autonomous vehicle following without any information obtained from road infrastructure or communication from the lead vehicle. The relative inter-vehicle position and orientation used for feedback control is obtained with the help of linear camera installed on the following vehicle and three infra-red emitters mounted on the leading vehicle. An adaptive controller for the following vehicle is proposed which deals with unknown leader linear and angular velocities, as well the curvature radius of the path travelled by the lead vehicle. For constant velocity maneuvres of the leader, at steady state, the two-vehicle convoy will travel concentric arcs of same radii with prescribed inter-vehicle spacing. Various simulation and experimental results demonstrating the performance of the controller are presented.

Mots clés: Autonomous vehicle following; Linear camera; Nonlinear adaptive control

Domaines: Automatique

Michel Null Parent, Plamen Petrov, Clément Boussard. Development and experimentation of an autonomous vehicle platoon for urban environments. IASTED International Conference on Robotics - Robo 2010, Nov 2010, Phuket, Thailand. ⟨inria-00559770⟩