Collision-Avoidance Lane Change Control Method for Connected Vehicle Platoon Under Mixed Traffic Environment

This study proposes a collision-avoidance lane change control method for a human-led-platoon to elude the non-connected vehicle in adjacent lane and complete lane change in a mixed traffic environment. Unlike the conventional cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) platoon, where the platoon vehicles are equipped with only front-looking sensors for automatic longitudinal control, an enhanced platoon vehicle sensor system equipped with multiple sensors both in longitudinal and lateral directions is designed. Under the power of the proposed platoon controller based on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, the platoon follower vehicles are fully autonomous both in longitudinal and lateral directions. The safe lane change decision-maker is designed based on finite state machine (FSM). The decision-maker fuses multiple sensor data and determines the lane change operation of the platoon follower vehicles. To verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, a three-vehicle platoon using the method conducts the lane change experiments in a high-fidelity mixed traffic scenario built by the PreScan-Simulink joint simulation platform. Three scenarios are tested, including unimpeded lane change, passive waiting lane change, and active accelerating lane change. The simulation results show that all platoon vehicles have a great success rate in lane change without collision with the non-connected obstacle vehicle in those scenarios. These results explicitly highlight the benefits of the enhanced platoon vehicle sensor system on improving the safety of platoon vehicles in the mixed traffic environment.