The idea of autonomous vehicles and automated highway systems is no new concept to the automotive industry. The potential benefits of such a technology are numerous. The platooning approach would imply energy economy through air drag reduction, but also reduced track congestion and increased safety.
The question of longitudinal control in a platoon configuration is central, the main concern being relative to safety. In this thesis, different classical control approaches will be compared and applied to the platooning problem. Among these approaches, one was tested in November 2012 in a demonstration which involved three teams and multiple vehicles from different Swedish universities.
Constrained optimal control comes with the prospect of increased safety and better handling of some characteristics of physical systems. The main negative impact of this constraint handling lies in its computational complexity. Numerical problems were encountered and described with the use of MPC. Proportional-Integral and Linear Quadratic controllers were retained and applied to the tracking problem in the context of vehicle platooning. These methods will be compared in a simulation environment.
Source: KTH
Author: Amazouz, Achour