Curvilinear Multilane Merging and Platooning With Bounded Control in Curved Road Coordinates.

Coordination of the Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) is a demanding task in aspects of effective incorporation of road information with the control of vehicle motion states. Formulating a platoon composed of multiple CAVs initially located in multiple lanes requires integrated consideration of both steering incurred by the curved road and merging actions. Meanwhile, additional requirement of intervehicle safety distance keeping as well as bounded actuations is also critical for practical implementation. Considering the above problems, a comprehensive framework containing a distributed controller is proposed in this paper to systematically address the combined problems. A bi-level curvilinear vehicle coordination scheme is proposed and proven to be capable of guiding CAVs to desired platoon formation with theoretical analysis. Besides, both longitudinal and lateral acceleration limitations have been taken into consideration. The limited longitudinal acceleration is included in the design of nonlinear saturated controller of which the convergence has been proven. Adaptive merging is realized with a bounded lateral controller. The condition of limiting the initial states to guarantee safe intervehicle distance maintenance is formulated. Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) test demonstrations in multiple road scenarios with different curvatures validate the performance of the proposed controller over existing baseline methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]