Lateral string stability of vehicle platoons

This internship report is part of a larger assignment which is an analysis of lateral string stability and the development of a controller design method with guaranteed lateral string stability. Lateral string stability is an issue when a look-ahead sensing method is used in combination with a vehicle-following control strategy. The coupling between vehicles enables errors to increase while they propagate upstream through a string of vehicles. Communicating desired yaw rate or lateral acceleration and use this information for controller design could be an option to achieved guaranteed lateral string stability. One of the applications of lateral control will be conducting maneuvers like merging or lane changes. During these maneuvers the side-slip angles of the tyres stay within the
interval of linear tyre response, this means that side-slip angles of the tyres are within 0:5. On this interval the non-linear and linearized tyre model have the same linear response. This makes is possible to use a linearized vehicle model with linear tyres for the modeling of the lateral and yaw dynamics of the vehicle. This is validated using experimental data and it is shown that the response of the linearized vehicle model is almost equal to the actual vehicle response.