Lateral control of vehicle platoons with on-board sensing and Inter-Vehicle Communication

This paper presents a lateral control strategy for a platoon of vehicles which utilises only data which can realistically be measured by each vehicle, augmented with Inter-Vehicle Communication (IVC). The control problem resembles those which exist for longitudinal control and this introduces the challenge of estimating a vehicles lateral position and velocity when direct measurement is not possible (due to lane markings being obscured by a preceding vehicle). It is shown that the associated robust controller, which we propose, exhibits string stability in the presence of sensor and actuation delays and a high fidelity simulation is conducted to verify this

Formal Verification of Autonomous Vehicle Platooning

The coordination of multiple autonomous vehicles into convoys or platoons is expected on our highways in the near future. However, before such platoons can be deployed, the new autonomous behaviors of the vehicles in these platoons must be certified. An appropriate representation for vehicle platooning is as a multi-agent system in which each agent captures the "autonomous decisions" carried out by each vehicle. In order to ensure that these autonomous decision-making agents in vehicle platoons never violate safety requirements, we use formal verification. However, as the formal verification technique used to verify the agent code does not scale to the full system and as the global verification technique does not capture the essential verification of autonomous behavior, we use a combination of the two approaches. This mixed strategy allows us to verify safety requirements not only of a model of the system, but of the actual agent code used to program the autonomous vehicles