Improving the Safe Operation of Platoon Lane Changing for Connected Automated Vehicles: A Novel Field-Driven Approach

Abstract

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) platoons have been widely researched because of their efficiency advantages. However, most studies mainly focus on the stability control of platoon and there is a lack of in-depth consideration of platoon lane changing. In order to make up for this vacancy, this study focused on the dynamic gap in the platoon lane changing process. First, an intra-platoon potential field of vehicles in the platoon was established by combining the repulsive force under vehicle safety and the gravity inside the platoon, which can effectively characterize the risk distribution around vehicles. Second, the platoon lane changing process was designed and critical distances of platoon vehicles under different conflict situations were analyzed. Based on this, this study proposed a critical distance model of platoon lane changing. Furthermore, we also found that the critical distances for platoon lane changing were within an interval with upper and lower bounds, which was different from the minimum distance of non-platoon vehicles. Finally, experiments were conducted and the results showed that the proposed model could effectively represent the relationship between the distance between vehicles in the platoon and the motion state of the surrounding vehicles. Moreover, the proposed method could also be applied to the lane-changing maneuver of a self-organizing platoon at a strategic level in a CAVs system.

Research of obstacle vehicles avoidance for automated heavy vehicle platoon by switching the formation

“…And the state space equations based on a linear and invariant system used to design the lateral controller could be formulated as shown in Equation (21).…”

“…When choosing $$\Delta S$$, the collision avoidance constraint should be satisfied. With lot of researches studying the collision avoidance constraint, collision circle method [21] and polyhedron method [31, 36] are two main methods. In this paper, collision circle method is used.…”

“…If the platoon wants to return to the pre-set lanes after completing obstacle avoidance, multiple planning trajectories need to be spliced. Besides, the artificial potential field (APF) method is also a commonly used obstacle avoidance strategy [20,21]. The goal of obstacle avoidance is achieved by building APFs for the road, obstacle vehicles, and the platoon.…”