Distributed Control Of Vehicles Platooning

Intelligent Transportation System(ITS),a new transportation management system applied to urban traffic,is an important part of the “Smart City”,which is based on the achievements of traffic engineering,control engineering,communication transmission technology,electronic sensing technology,and so on.The vehicle control system is an essential subsystem of ITS.In this thesis,we focus on the control of a platoon of vehicles,which will significantly the traffic flow,reduce the fuel consumption and realief the traffic congestion.The main task of this paper is to design and verify the platooning control algorithm,through MATLAB simulation and three Pioneer3 cars experiments.We consider both longitudinal control and lateral control.First,existing control algorithm of vehicles longitudinal control is investigated.And we find that the control problem of platooning can be viewed as a consensus problem of multiagent systems using a leader-follower framework.The communication between vehicles is described by directed graph.The follower robots can only get information of its neighboring robots.A distributed cooperative longitudinal control law is designed.The individual vehicle stability and string stability are analyzed.Secondly,an overview of software platform and hardware platform of the Pioneer3 cars is provided.The cars are equipped with the sensors such as inertial measurement unit and laser radar.We analyze the kinematic model and motion characteristics of the Pioneer3 cars,and design a lateral control strategy for the maintenance of the car lane.Finally,under the ROS environment of Ubuntu operation system,the corresponding nodes are written.These nodes can realize information interaction between cars through the wireless network.Then we design and debug the corresponding parameters of the controller.Through simulations and Pioneer3 cars experiments,we illustrate the effectiveness of vehicle lateral control strategy and longitudinal control strategy.We consider both scenarios when the speed of the leader-car is steady and disturbed.