Merging Strategies, Trajectory Planning and Controls for Platoon of Connected, and Autonomous Vehicles

This paper addresses the problem of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) merging into platoons in a communication- enabled environment, and studies different aspects of platoon formation, merging strategies, control approaches, and emergency braking mitigation during the merging and formation process. First it introduces a strategy and the requirements for safe and effective execution of multi-vehicles merging into a platoon. Second, several longitudinal controllers benefiting from feedforward information -via communication- have been implemented and discussed comparatively under several interesting scenarios through simulations. Third, it proposes various safe and smooth lateral trajectory plans of vehicles merging into an existing platoon. Fourth, it investigates a common emergency situation in which the preceding vehicle experiences a sudden braking while a multi-vehicle merging task is executing. A method is proposed to safely handle such scenarios. Finally, this paper presents several simulation tests to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed strategies and methods.