Autonomous Lane Change of Heavy-duty Trucks Based on Path Following Control

Abstract

In Japan, a new project for reducing CO₂, called "Energy ITS project", has started since 2008 by NEDO (New Energy and Industrial Technology Development Organization). In this project, an autonomous platooning system of heavy-duty trucks is developed to reduce the amount of CO₂ emission. This project assumes that trucks run in mixed-traffic, where there are various dangerous factors such as a broken-down car, an obstacle and so on. Therefore, the technology of autonomous lane changing for safe platooning is required. In this paper, the method of autonomous lane changing based on path following is proposed and confirmed to be very effective by experiments.