Investigation on the target trajectory generation of the preceding vehicle following control

Abstract

Preceding vehicle following control system has been investigated widely. In many previous studies, the vehicular gap is assumed to be short, so the following vehicle can travel stably only by using heading angle toward preceding vehicle. However, the vehicle gap sometimes becomes longer at the complex surroundings such as intersection, so there is a problem that the following vehicle tends to travel along a shortcut path. Therefore, the preceding vehicle trajectory needs to be recognized correctly, but it is impossible because the system can use only current preceding vehicle position. We proposed the algorithm of the preceding vehicle trajectory generation. In the algorithm, the relative preceding vehicle position that is recognized at each period is hold. And each position is converted into the coordinate fixed to the present ego-vehicle. After that point sequence is generated by each position data. By using least squares method, the preceding vehicle point sequence is approximated by a curve line as the preceding vehicle trajectory. By using the trajectory as the target path for course following control, it becomes possible to follow the preceding vehicle regardless of the vehicular gap. Moreover, the validity of the proposed method is confirmed by the experiment conducted with an actual vehicle.