Combined longitudinal and lateral control of car-like vehicle platooning with extended look-ahead

In this paper, we present a novel look-ahead concept for combined longitudinal and lateral vehicle following control for a car-like platoon. A nonlinear controller structure, which is based on Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control, is designed for the lateral and longitudinal direction. For practical implementation and cost efficiency, a preceding vehicle look-ahead approach is considered since it utilizes the already available information (such as preceding vehicle position, orientation, and velocity) from radar and vehicle-to-vehicle communication. However, due to the position control in the look-ahead approach, the follower vehicle may cut corners. To overcome this problem, the look-ahead is extended to a point perpendicular to the direction of the preceding vehicle, which can be viewed as a virtual preceding vehicle tracking objective. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the designed controller with the extended look-ahead approach, simulations are performed and further validated with experiments on a mobile robot platform. The results prove the effectiveness of the extended look-ahead approach.