A Cooperative Protocol for Vehicle Merging Using Bi-dimensional Artificial Potential Fields

In recent years, platooning solutions like cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) have been deeply studied. It is common in such platooning literature to assume that the vehicles drive on the same lane (longitudinal platooning). At the same time, lateral control during merging maneuvers is commonly addressed as a path planning problem, in which the ego vehicle changes the lane during merging without necessarily cooperating with its neighboring vehicles (i.e. without considering gap closing). The primary objective of this article is to develop a control strategy which involves both longitudinal and lateral vehicle dynamics, where the vehicles merge and form a platoon in a cooperative way without a priori path planning. Appropriately designed bi-dimensional artificial potential fields are used to achieve this goal and the proposed protocol is verified through simulations with CarSim.Accepted Author ManuscriptTeam Bart De Schutte