Narrow space driving of welfare vehicles using robust platoon control with adaptive way point tracking

The welfare vehicles, for example electric wheelchairs, will take important roles not only to improve the quality of life of patients but also to reduce the load of care workers. The platoon driving of the welfare vehicles may become one of the effective leading methods of patients. Although the platoon driving systems for automobiles were widely studied assuming a straight road which has good visibility, the systems for welfare vehicles have been scarcely tried in a narrow corridor corner of care facilities. It is a reason of difficulty that the radius of curvature on the driving trajectory is very small and the pathway is complicated in the buildings. There are two issues for the platoon of welfare vehicles to drive in the narrow space. One is to design the precise steering controller keeping safe inter-vehicle distance. The other is to construct the robust controller which suppresses the influence of the parameter variation of the vehicle. This paper aims to design robust platoon driving control of welfare vehicles. The proposed controller consists of the longitudinal control and lateral control using MEC with the adaptive target tracking considering the curvature of the wheel track of the preceding vehicle. In driving experiments in a narrow corridor corner, the tracking error of proposed method is drastically reduced to 15% or less.