A New Strategy of Non-Linear Trajectory Generation for a Platoon to Reduce Inter-Vehicle Error Distance Estimation

Abstract This work is focused on estimating the distance error between vehicles of a platoon. This error is especially serious in non-linear trajectories and it gives place to lateral and longitudinal oscillations in the platoon guidance. For this reason, a new strategy is presented in which the leader, divides the trajectory into sub-trajectories as a function of the curvature and generates a set of points separated by a sampling-distance which is calculated as a function of the curvature in order to limit the inter-vehicle spacing error. This set of points is considered as the reference trajectory, which all the other vehicles have to follow.