Path Planning and Cooperative Control for Automated Vehicle Platoon Using Hybrid Automata

TLDR

Cooperative driving systems can improve road utilization, safety, and efficiency by coordinating vehicle control and platooning, and are inherently hybrid systems that combine discrete maneuver transitions with continuous vehicle dynamics. This work proposes a distributed hybrid control framework that synchronously performs path planning and motion control for each automated vehicle in a platoon. The framework integrates an artificial potential field approach with model predictive control, replacing the traditional gradient descent with the MPC optimizer, and employs a hybrid automata‑based maneuver switching model for cruising and platooning. Simulation results in various traffic scenarios confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Abstract

Cooperative driving systems may increase the utilization of road infrastructure resources through coordinated control and platooning of individual vehicles with the potential of enhancing both traffic safety and efficiency. Vehicle cooperative driving is essentially a hybrid system that is a combination of discrete events, i.e., the transition of discrete cooperative maneuvering modes, such as vehicle merging and platoon splitting, as well as continuous vehicle dynamics. In this paper, a novel hybrid system consisting of the discrete cooperative maneuver switch and the continuous vehicle motion control is introduced into a multi-vehicle cooperative control system with a distributed control structure, leading each automated vehicle to conduct path planning and motion control separately. The primary novelty of this paper lies in that it presents a control algorithm combining artificial potential field (APF) approach with model predictive control (MPC), and using the optimizer of the MPC controller to replace the gradient-descending method in the traditional APF approach. Such a method can accomplish both path planning and motion control synchronously. Second, based on hybrid automata, a cooperative maneuver switching model consisting of a system state set and a discrete maneuver transition rule is established for two discrete maneuvers in the cooperative driving system, i.e., single-vehicle cruising and multiple-vehicle platooning. Simulations in several typical traffic scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.