abstract
- Platooning control is intended as the next step in the coordination of multiple ground vehicles. These vehicles autonomously realize desired actions such as collaborative navigation, traffic mitigation, and swarm configuration, among others. In this respect, this paper presents a novel control approach for autonomous guidance, based on the mathematical model of two vehicles lying on the Line-of-Sight reference frame. A nonlinear block control law ensures that both position and velocity of the relative reference frame converge to the desired references.The reference generator represents an additional original aspect of the proposal since it is given by an exosystem which is able to provide trajectories that do not depend on a pre-defined shape, as commonly happens in the state of the art. Conversely, the author¿s approach makes use of asymptotic convergence to the steady state as part of the trajectory behavior. In addition, the convergence velocity is strictly defined in terms of the exponential gain, ensuring that the reference trajectory remains within a given time window. Simulation results obtained with MATLAB/Simulink show quality and performances of both the controller and the reference generator ensuring the viability of the presented algorithms. © 2013 IEEE.