Design of leader's path following system for multi-vehicle autonomous convoy

In this paper, a practical real-time leader's path following control system is proposed. The control system which is composed of pose estimation of preceding vehicle, leader's path queue management and autonomous controller is a general framework for manned and unmanned vehicle convoys. Then the algorithms for waypoints management, vision-based vehicle tracking, LIDAR-based vehicle tracking, EKF-based data fusion, adaptive inter-distance control and model-based trajectory following are described in detail. Accordingly, the proposed approach is developed and implemented on newly developed UGVs and numerous field tests are carried out to evaluate the system performance in both on-road and off-road scenarios. Experiments show that the system performs well and is robust to environmental disturbance.