Lateral and longitudinal control of bus platoon

A city bus capacity could be increased and costs reduced by operating buses as platoons. The current study focuses on platoon consisting of two electric city buses where a driver operates the first bus and the second bus follows the first one autonomously. The follower bus should be able to follow the path driven by the leader bus and avoid inter-vehicular collisions while driving close to the leader bus. We investigated one longitudinal controller and four lateral control laws. In simulations, the longitudinal controller worked well for evenly loaded buses with inter-vehicular distances from 2 m to 10 m. It failed to prevent collisions when the follower was loaded more heavily than the leader. The lateral control laws proposed were geometrical in nature. They required the relative position of the leader as the only input. The Pure Pursuit and Modified Pure Pursuit methods were able to follow the leader. The Circular Pursuit and Spline Pursuit methods showed oscillatory behavior and did not follow the leader well.