String Stability Guaranteed Lane Change Maneuver for Automated Vehicles with Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication

Abstract This paper considers a specific scenario that is the incorporative operation of lane change with a vehicle platoon. In other words, the lane-change vehicle will insert into the platoon in the main lane and be a member of the platoon. Fast lane-change operation and keeping safe inter-vehicle distance are the significant issues. This work proposes a two-level control strategy to deal with the issue. The high level deals with the trajectory planing for the longitudinal movement of the vehicle platoon and for the lateral movement of the lane-change vehicle, respectively. A distributed adaptive cruise control algorithm, which guarantees string stability of the platoon system, is employed to manage the longitudinal movement. Desired lateral trajectory is generated by solving an optimization problem by using the dynamic programming (DP) method. With the obtained desired longitudinal and lateral trajectories for the lane-change vehicle, the trajectory tracking is realized by the designed low-level control laws that are simple PID controllers. Simulation tests verify the performance of the control system.