Hierarchical platoon motion planning strategy based on leader-follower structure

Platoon technology provides new solutions for safe travel, energy-saving, and emission reduction. In this paper, a leader-follower structure for platoon motion planning is proposed, using a hierarchical strategy. First of all, trajectories generation based on quintic polynomial is presented. The state and trajectory of the preceding vehicle are used as a reference to constrain the lateral and longitudinal feasible space for the follower. Meanwhile, the quintic polynomial is adopted to generate trajectory clusters and the optimal trajectories are selected based on the multi-objective evaluation. Then, the independent receding horizon optimization modules are utilized to optimize each trajectory to make them smoother and safer. Finally, the simulation shows the advantages of the proposed method, and evaluation results demonstrate our method avoids dimensional explosion