Abstract: The effective motion planning for obstacle avoidance is the precondition to guarantee the driving safety of the intelligent and connected vehicle platoon. In this paper, an asynchronous obstacle avoidance strategy based on model predictive control (MPC) is proposed for intelligent and connected vehicle platoon to address the lateral control problem while the platoon is avoiding the obstacles. Firstly, the artificial potential field (APF) theory is used to establish the potential field of the surrounding traffic participants and roads. The desired lane and velocity information is obtained by the global planning module and the perception module. Secondly, comprehensively considering the APF, desired lane and velocity, and kinetic constraints, the MPC is used to accomplish the multi-objective control to avoid the obstacles. Besides, the asynchronous avoidance strategy is used for the platoon to decrease the driving risk and the lane space requirements. Finally, several obstacle avoidance scenarios are constructed based on the co-simulation of MATLAB/Simulink and TruckSim, including the single obstacle avoidance and multi-obstacle avoidance scenarios. The performances of the synchronous avoidance strategy and the asynchronous avoidance strategy are compared, and the result indicates that the MPC-based asynchronous avoidance strategy for intelligent and connected vehicle platoon can effectively improve the safety of the platoon system. Therefore, the feasibility and superiority of the proposed strategy is verified.
Keywords: intelligent and connected vehicle platoon; model predictive control(MPC); obstacle avoidance