Bending Virtual Spring-Damper: A Solution to Improve Local Platoon Control

  • Authors:
  • Jean-Michel Contet;Franck Gechter;Pablo Gruer;Abderrafiaa Koukam

  • Affiliations:
  • Systems and Transportation Laboratory (SET), University of Technology of Belfort-Montbeliard (UTBM), Belfort, France;Systems and Transportation Laboratory (SET), University of Technology of Belfort-Montbeliard (UTBM), Belfort, France;Systems and Transportation Laboratory (SET), University of Technology of Belfort-Montbeliard (UTBM), Belfort, France;Systems and Transportation Laboratory (SET), University of Technology of Belfort-Montbeliard (UTBM), Belfort, France

  • Venue:
  • ICCS '09 Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Computational Science: Part I
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

This article presents a local control approach to linear vehicle platooning. Linear platoon systems are sets of vehicles that use local or global perception capabilities to form a train configuration, without any hard grip element. Public transportation is beginning to interest in platoon systems as a technological base to conceive new services. The main problem related to platoon system's control corresponds with maintaining inter-vehicle distance. In literature, the platoon's geometry control problem is treated according to two approaches: global or local vehicle control. This paper focuses on a local approach which does not require sophisticated sensors and/or costly road equipment. This local control approach intends to obtain very good global matching to arbitrary trajectories, only from local perception which consists in measuring the vectorial distance between a given vehicle and its predecessor. The behavior of each platoon vehicle is determined from a physics inspired multi agent interaction model based on a virtual spring-damper. Furthermore, stability, platoon safety properties are checked using physics and mathematical proofs. Finally, simulation is used to measure trajectory error and inter-vehicle distance evolution.