Autonomous Navigation and Platooning using a Sensory Memory

Automatic guidance of urban electric vehicles relying on a sensory memory is addressed in this presentation. Two exteroceptive sensors are successively investigated in order to build the sensory memory: an RTK GPS sensor and a monocular camera. Then, nonlinear control laws, achieving an exact decoupling between lateral and longitudinal guidance functionalities is presented, so that path following and platoon control can be addressed separately. Inter-vehicles communication, relying on WiFi technology, is used in order to enable a global platoon control: each vehicle is aware on-line of the whole platoon configuration and not only of the preceding vehicle relative localization. Full scale experiments, carried out with Cycab vehicles, are finally reported, and demonstrate high accuracy vehicles control with any of the two exteroceptive sensors considered her