Vehicular Platooning on Curved Paths Considering Collision Avoidance and String Stability.

This work addresses the vehicle platooning problem on curved paths. The main contribution of the work is a suitable use of curvilinear coordinates so as to make longitudinal and lateral control able to satisfy practical platooning objectives. Specifically, the longitudinal control is designed to guarantee collision avoidance, which is possible thanks to an appropriate contraction property in the framework of sliding mode control. Notably, a suitable choice of the gains of the sliding surface is also able to satisfy acceleration/deceleration limits and string stability requirements, of practical relevance for platooning. The aforementioned curvilinear coordinates allow to decouple the lateral from the longitudinal dynamics: lateral control is then realized via anothe sliding surface designe dusing the vector field approach. Asymptotic convergence to the desired path is shown via Lyapunov techniques. Numerical experiments are carried out to validate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.