A Vehicle Following Controller for Highly-Actuated Vehicles

This work is concerned with the design and validation of a vehicle following controller (VFC). The goal of the VFC is to determine appropriate control actions for a highly-actuated electric vehicle such that the longitudinal and lateral motion of a target vehicle is followed. To achieve this goal, a combination of a non-linear guidance law and a model-predictive method is explored. The proposed method is able to handle actuation dynamics, actuator range limits and other physical constraints, e.g., resulting from tire-road frictional forces limits. Preliminary validations tests, carried out in a hardware-in-the-loop environment and with a partial implementation of the VFC, demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed controller.