A NOVEL FORMATION CONTROL STRATEGY FOR HETEROGENEOUS VEHICLES IN HIGHWAY SCENARIOS

During the recent years, formation control has become an active research topic in Control Systems Engineering. Its attractiveness has grown due to the huge enhancements that it allows to introduce in various applications: the agents involved in a formation can, in fact, complete tasks in a more efficient, effective and robust manner. The focus of this work concerns Connected and Automated Vehicles in highway scenarios, where the introduction of fleets of vehicles has been proved effective and is forecasted to be one of the methodologies with wider impact on the future transportation infrastructure. Although in the currently available huge body of literature a lot of different vehicular formation control techniques are proposed, most of them suffer from some common problems which limit their applicability. Particularly, in highway scenarios, where the vehicles usually perform high speed maneuvers and physical and safety constraints must be enforced, such problems become even more evident. In order to overcome these issues, a novel formation creation strategy is here proposed for heterogeneous vehicles in highway scenarios. In particular, a distributed two-step iterative procedure, which relies on Dynamic Programming and trajectory tracking, is developed and discussed. Experimental and simulation results are provided for the purpose of validating this work in terms of effectiveness and applicability.