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Distributed Formation Control of Homogeneous Vehicle Platoon Considering Vehicle Dynamics

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Abstract

Vehicle dynamics plays a significant role on the formation of a vehicle platoon, especially at high speed condition. This paper proposes a distributed platoon formation framework for homogeneous autonomous vehicles which takes the vehicle dynamics into consideration. The boundaries of vehicle stability are firstly calculated by considering both lateral dynamics and actuator saturation. By combining the stability boundaries with multi-objective flocking (MOF) algorithm, a distributed formation controller is designed, which can form the vehicle platoon with high cruising speed steadily and rapidly. In addition, a low-level tracking controller is proposed to constitute a hierarchical control architecture which can achieve stable and accurate formation of platoon. Simulation results show the proposed platoon formation controller achieves safe, stable and rapid platoon formation than the traditional MOF-based formation controller which does not consider the vehicle dynamics.

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Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 51575103, U1664258 and 51805081, National Key R&D Program in China under Grants 2016YFB0100906 and 2016YFD0700905, and Scientific Research Foundation of Graduate School of Southeast University under Grant YBJJ1704.

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Correspondence to Guodong Yin.

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Xu, L., Zhuang, W., Yin, G. et al. Distributed Formation Control of Homogeneous Vehicle Platoon Considering Vehicle Dynamics. Int.J Automot. Technol. 20, 1103–1112 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12239-019-0103-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12239-019-0103-y

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