An Integrated Longitudinal and Lateral Vehicle Following Control System With Radar and Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication

A control framework adopting the on-board radar sensor and vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication has been developed to fulfill the automated vehicle following in the longitudinal and lateral directions. First, a linear feedforward and feedback controller constrained by the string stability is designed to follow the velocity of the preceding vehicle and ensure a safe inter-vehicle distance. Then, a path estimation method is proposed to calculate the trajectory of the preceding vehicle based on its historical movement data transmitted by V2V. The model predictive control method is applied to regulate the steering angle of the front wheel. Furthermore, the robustness and adaptability of the proposed method are validated by simulations and tests under several driving conditions. The results indicate that the proposed method shows the reliable performance to realize the longitudinal and lateral vehicle following only by radar and V2V, independent of high-accuracy positioning system and road marking, and is promising to expand available areas of automated vehicle platooning.