Splitting and merging control of multiple platoons with Signal Temporal Logic

Abstract

Coordination of multiple platoons involves the design of vehicles' trajectories ensuring splitting and merging of different platoons in a safe and energy-optimal manner. In this work, we consider the split-merge-maintain problem between any pair of platoons in which a number of vehicles temporally split from the rest, allowing the vehicles of another platoon to merge, and move with the preceding and following vehicles as a single, large platoon. Here, the splitting, merging and distancemaintaining tasks are expressed in Signal Temporal Logic (STL) and a control barrier function (CBF) is introduced to encode the STL constraints. The control inputs of the vehicles are, then, found as a solution to a computationally efficient, convex, quadratic program. The effectiveness of the proposed method is verified in simulation.

Platoons Coordination Based on Decentralized Higher Order Barrier Certificates

“…Theorem 1. Consider a given TCHCBF h(x, t) introduced in Definition 5 with the associated functions ψ k (x, t), k ∈ {1, 2}, as defined in (10). Define z = [u n , ε]…”

“…A class of time-varying fixed-time convergent CBFs for coupled multiagent systems under STL tasks has been introduced in [9]. In [10], some coordination tasks among platoons are expressed in STL and a CBF-based approach is employed to satisfy the STL constraints.…”