Merging Strategy for Vehicles by Applying Cooperative Tracking Control

This work presents a merging strategy for cooperative vehicles. In the proposed strategy, each vehicle possesses a tracking controller that considerers both tracking and coupling error signals, where all vehicles in the group know their positions. The trajectories of the cooperative vehicles are developed, to guarantee that each vehicle keeps a certain distance from the rest of the vehicles in the group, and are designed by using the virtual structure approach. The merging strategy is successfully validated in an experimental setup consisting of a group of nonholonomic mobile vehicles that represents the simplest bicycle model for cars with a zero vehicle length. It is shown using Lyapunov theory that this strategy is global asymptotically stable for the group.