Longitudinal Control of a Heavy-Duty Vehicle

Sammanfattning: Platooning and cooperative driving can decrease the emissions of greenhouse gases and increase the traffic capacity of the roads. The Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge, GCDC, is a competition that was held in May 2016 on highway A270, between Helmond and Eindhoven in the Netherlands. The competition is focused on cooperative driving. The participating teams are constellations of students and faculty from different uni-versities in Europe. A cornerstone in the GCDC is autonomous platooning. The main objective of this thesis is to design a state feedback controller for longitudinal control of a Scania truck, i.e., engine and braking control. This was done so the truck can keep an inter-vehicle distance and velocity. A linear quadratic regulator (LQR) for the platooning is derived. the controller is designed in MATLAB Simulink and implemented on a real time target, Speedgoat. For simulations of the regulator, Scania supplied a pre-compiled Simulink model of a similar truck, a G480 mining truck. The results of the competition show that the controller is capable of platooning based on RADAR (adaptive cruise con-trol) and vehicle to vehicle communication (cooperative adaptive cruise control). In the highway scenario the maximum deviation from desired distance in steady state was less than 4 m and the maximum deviation in velocity was less than 1 m/s. The controller is able to keep the truck at a certain distance from the preceding vehicle as well as keeping the same velocity. If the distance is decreased the truck will brake in a controlled manner to keep the distance. The KTH team finished in third place out of ten participating teams.