LATERAL GUIDANCE OF HEAVY-DUTY VEHICLE PLATOONS USING MODEL-BASED PREDICTIVE CONTROL

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 concept for the generation of reference variables as well as for a model-based predictive control (MPC) scheme to be used for the lateral control within the path tracking. It enables the following vehicles to track the path of the leading vehicle directly by using on-board 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 using Matlab/Simulink. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the reference generation as well as of the proposed MPC control scheme. The application to real vehicles will be part of the current project KONVOI at RWTH Aachen.