A control strategy taking advantage of inter-vehicle communication for platooning navigation in urban environment

This paper deals with platooning navigation in the context of innovative solutions for urban transportation systems. More precisely, a sustainable approach centered on automated electric vehicles in free-access is considered. To tackle the major problem of congestions in dense areas, cooperative navigation according to a platoon formation is investigated. With the aim to ensure the formation stability, i.e. longitudinal disturbances within the platoon do not grow when progressing down the chain, a global decentralized platoon control strategy is here proposed. It is supported by inter-vehicle communications and relies on nonlinear control techniques. A wide range of experiments, carried out with up to four urban vehicles, demonstrates the capabilities of the proposed approach: two localization devices have been tested (RTK-GPS and monocular vision) along with two guidance modes (the path to be followed is either predefined or inferred on-line from the motion of the manually driven first vehicle).