Abstract:
In this paper, two types of vehicle platoon following controllers are designed, respectively, according to the situation that the communication between vehicles is normal or interrupted in the driving process. Laser range finder and monocular camera are used as vehicle sensors. Firstly, the physical characteristic information of obstacles in the environment is collected from the laser sensor and the obtained data is clustered by means of the DBSCAN algorithm. The clustering result of obstacles in the environment is fitted to the physical shape with a minimum circumscribed rectangle, whose center point is taken as the center of each obstacle. Secondly, the angle of the leader vehicle is obtained from visual sensor. The color distribution information of the preceding vehicle is pre-defined. The Camshift algorithm is used for calculating the relative angle between the preceding and the following vehicle in each frame of picture. Thirdly, the information collected by two kinds of sensors is fused for designing controller. According to whether there exists the communication between the leader and the follower or not, this paper proposes two different controllers based on Lyapunov function and fuzzy control logic, respectively. When the communication between vehicles is normal, the Lyapunov-based controller design will be used. When there doesn’t exist the communication between vehicles, the fuzzy control strategy will be selected. If the vehicle does not resume communication within a certain period of time, it would move to a safety area to wait for repairing. Finally, the proposed algorithm is verified via the theoretical derivation and the simulation in robot operating system (ROS).