Coordinated Maneuvering of Automated Vehicles in Platoons

To eventually have automated vehicles operate in platoons, it is necessary to study what information each vehicle must have and to whom it must communicate for safe and efficient maneuvering in all possible conditions. This paper formulates the problem in terms of sensing and communicated information. By emulating platoons using a group of mobile robots, the authors demonstrate the feasibility of maneuvers (such as entering, exiting, and recuperating from an accident) using different distributed coordination strategies. The coordination strategies studied range from no communication to unidirectional or bidirectional exchanges between vehicles and to fully centralized decision by the leading vehicle. One particularity of this paper is that instead of assuming that the platoon leader or all vehicles globally monitor what is going on, only the vehicles involved in a particular maneuver are concerned, distributing decisions locally among the platoon. This paper reports experimental trials using robots having limited and directional perception of other things, using vision and obstacle avoidance sensing. Results confirm the feasibility of the coordination strategies in different conditions and various uses of communicated information to compensate for sensing limitations