Longitudinal and lateral control for automatic vehicle following

The paper presents a control law for the platoon of two vehicles. The dynamics of the controlled vehicle is described by the classical bicycle model with coupled longitudinal and lateral motion. The vehicle heading set point is computed with a "virtual drawbar" strategy and the chosen spacing policy is velocity dependent in order to take into account some safety factors. First the nonlinear vehicle model is written into the form of a fuzzy Takagi-Sugeno model. Then a fuzzy Parallel Distributed Compensation (PDC) is computed. In order to take into account the passenger comfort and to tune the closed loop dynamics, the linear TS-submodels poles are placed in a specified LMI region. Preliminary simulation results illustrate the reliability of the approach and allow tuning the drawbar strategy.