Minimizing the inter-vehicle distances of the time headway policy for urban platoon control with decoupled longitudinal and lateral control

Abstract

Recently in [1], a modification of classical constant time headway policy (CTH) was proposed in order to make CTH very practical and easy to use in real applications. This modification was tested and its benefits were shown only for highways application. In this paper, this modification is generalized in order to make it applicable in urban environment. Dynamic and kinematic models of the vehicle are mixted without accounting wheel slip. By using exact linearization technique, lateral and longitudinal dynamics become decoupled. Stability and accuracy of the global system are checked. Using TORCS [8] in simulation, effectiveness of the proposed modification and its potential effect on traffic density are reported.