Decentralized Platooning With Obstacle Avoidance for Car-Like Vehicles With Limited Sensing

In this letter, we consider the predecessor-following control problem for a platoon of car-like vehicles moving on a planar surface with cyclic obstacles. Each vehicle is equipped with an on-board camera that detects its preceding vehicle, and a laser scanner that detects the obstacles around it. Within this framework, we design a fully decentralized control scheme, in the sense that each vehicle calculates its own control signal incorporating only local information, acquired by its on-board camera and laser scanner. Collisions with obstacles, collisions between successive vehicles and connectivity breaks owing to the limited field of view of the camera as well as to visual occlusions raised by static obstacles are provably avoided. Moreover, the transient and steady-state response of the closed-loop system is a priori determined by certain designer-specified functions and is fully decoupled by the number of vehicles in the platoon and the control gains selection. Finally, a simulation study is carried out in MATLAB and Coppelia Robotics V-REP to prove the control protocol's efficiency.