The rapid development of vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication and automation technologies provides new opportunities for the control of truck platoons, where not only to cruise on a straight road but also to safely turn on a curved road are required simultaneously. This talk will focus on the longitudinal and lateral control of truck platoons. We show firstly by an example that the longitudinal and lateral coupling property of vehicles has to be taken into account while designing distributed controllers of vehicle platoons. Then, synchronous distributed model predictive control scheme of vehicle platoons is proposed, where both the coupled dynamics of vehicles and a lanekeeping model are adopted to predict the dynamic of trucks, and to keep vehicles in the designated lane. Simulation results reveal that when the leading truck accelerates or decelerates, the following trucks in the platoon can keep the same velocity as the leading truck, and maintain the desired safe distance between the front and rear trucks.

Shuyou Yu received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in Control Science & Engineering at Jilin University, PR China, in 1997 and 2005, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in Engineering Cybernetics at the University of Stuttgart, Germany, in 2011. From 2010 to 2011, he was a research and teaching assistant at the Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control at the University of Stuttgart. In 2012, he joined the faculty of the Department of Control Science & Engineering at Jilin University, PR China, where he is currently an associate professor. His main areas of interest are in model predictive control, robust control, and applications in mechatronic systems.