LANE CHANGE OF HEAVY-DUTY VEHICLE PLATOONS WITHOUT LATERAL POSITION INFORMATION 1

Heavy-duty vehicle platoons are a possible future form of organising goods traffic. Only the leading vehicle is manually driven while all the following vehicles are automatically controlled in longitudinal and lateral direction. This paper presents a control concept for the lane change manoeuvre of the complete platoon which considers the fact that during the transition from one lane to the other the on-board sensors of the platoon vehicles cannot measure the lateral position on the road. It enables the following vehicles to track the path of its preceding vehicle based only on the relative position to the predecessor using onboard sensors as well as the existing communication structure of the platoon. It is shown that the presented control concept is feasible and it is evaluated in simulations of tractor-semitrailer platoons.