Physics inspired multiagent system for vehicle platooning

Since about two decades, many works have been made in order to provide solutions to the vehicle platoon problem. The main issue related to platoon systems consists in controling the global platoon geometry: inter vehicular distance and trajectory matching. Another important aspect is related to platoon's evolution, mainly by vehicle merging and splitting. This paper presents a reactive multiagent solution aimed at providing distributed control of vehicle platoons with train configuration. This solution is based on a physics inspired interaction model in which every vehicle interacts only with the preceding one. Platoon stability emerges as a global result of the individual interactions. Furthermore, the adaptation to different kind of vehicles is made by tuning model's physical parameters. Simulation experiments have been made in order to compare our proposal with impedance control model. The experiments have been designed in order to evaluate trajectory matching abilities and merge/split capabilities. Experiments with on-wheels small-robots have also contributed to the validation of our approach.