Safe platooning control of connected and autonomous vehicles on curved multi-lane roads

TL;DR

This paper tackles safe platoon formation and merging for connected and automated vehicles on curved multi-lane roads by decoupling lateral path-following from longitudinal formation control. It introduces constructive barrier feedback to enforce collision avoidance with road boundaries and between vehicles without compromising the nominal objectives, and provides safety invariance and stability proofs. The approach is validated through simulations on curved highways and indoor experiments with scale-model vehicles, demonstrating safe convergence to the desired formation and robust performance under merging and formation scenarios. The work advances practical platooning in realistic road geometries and sets the stage for future obstacle-avoidance and robustness enhancements.

Abstract

This paper investigates the safe platoon formation tracking and merging control problem of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) on curved multi-lane roads. The first novelty is the separation of the control designs into two distinct parts: a lateral control law that ensures a geometrical convergence towards the reference path regardless of the translational velocity, and a longitudinal control design for each vehicle to achieve the desired relative arc length and velocity with respect to its neighboring vehicle. The second novelty is exploiting the constructive barrier feedback as an additive term to the nominal tracking control, ensuring both lateral and longitudinal collision avoidance. This constructive barrier feedback acts as a dissipative term, slowing down the relative velocity toward obstacles without affecting the nominal controller's performance. Consequently, our proposed control method enables safe platoon formation of vehicles on curved multi-lane roads, with theoretical guarantees for safety invariance and stability analysis. Simulation and experimental results on connected vehicles are provided to further validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Figures (13)

• Figure 1: Interaction topology for a 4-agent platoon formation scenario. The arrow indicates the information access for each agent $i$ from its neighboring agent $i-1$.
• Figure 2: Kinematic bicycle model for 2-dimensional vehicle motion in both global and Frenet frame. The rectangle of the solid blue line indicates the actual vehicle $i$ and the rectangle of the dashed blue line represents the corresponding virtual vehicle on the path.
• Figure 3: Road layout to illustrate the desired platoon formation.
• Figure 4: The lateral safety distance $d_i^{\eta_L}$ of vehicle $i$ with respect to road edges and the longitudinal safety distance $d_i^\rho$ of vehicle $i$ with respect to its predecessor $i-1$.
• Figure 5: Time evolution snapshot of the platoon formation process at distinct time points. Two parallel red solid lines are the road edges, the black solid line indicates the desired lane for the platoon, and the color solid lines indicate the vehicle trajectory during the formation process. The left sub-figure shows the result for the merging scenario and the right sub-figure shows the result for the formation scenario.

Theorems & Definitions (5)

• Lemma 1
• Lemma 2
• Theorem 1
• proof
• proof