Platoon of Autonomous Vehicles with Rear-End Collision Avoidance Through Time-Optimal Path-Constrained Trajectory Planning

This paper focuses on the minimum-time trajectory planning for a platoon of autonomous vehicles with rear-end collision avoidance along a given path under velocity and acceleration constraints. Specifically, with the aid of time-optimal path-constrained trajectory planning (TOPCTP) techniques, we present a trajectory planning algorithm to generate time-optimal velocity profiles, which guarantees the rear-end collision avoidance and satisfies velocity and acceleration constraints for the head and follower vehicles in this platoon. For the head vehicle, TOPCTP techniques are directly used to generate a time-optimal velocity profile. For the follower vehicle, a safety point on the given path is first computed to guarantee that the rear-end collision is avoided. Then, towards the safety point, TOPCTP techniques are again used to generate a time-optimal velocity profile of the follower vehicle along the given path under velocity and acceleration constraints. Simulation results on a platoon of nonholonomic vehicles are provided to verify the effectiveness of the presented algorithm.