Longitudinal and lateral control of heavy duty trucks for automated vehicle following in mixed traffic: experimental results from the CHAUFFEUR project

Longitudinal and lateral control of heavy duty trucks for vehicle following is presented. A manually driven leading truck is followed at a very small distance by another truck automatically. No additional road infrastructure is necessary. For longitudinal and lateral control, information about the relative position of the leading and following truck is determined by an onboard image processing system. Additionally, a vehicle to vehicle communication system gives information about the state of the leading truck. Longitudinal control has a two layered structure. In the inner control loop, a model based nonlinear acceleration controller linearises the essential nonlinearities of the drive train. Based on this linearisation, the outer control loop (a linear state space controller) controls a small and safe distance to the leading truck. Lateral control is done by an electronic tow bar approach where the rear truck follows the same track as the leading truck. Practical results with two 40 tonne semitrailer trucks are given.