A Scaled Three-Vehicle Platooning Platform
For researchers in autonomous vehicle platooning, this platform provides a practical testbed for rapid prototyping and controller validation, though it is an incremental contribution as a scaled experimental setup.
The paper presents a scaled three-vehicle platooning platform for experimental research on cooperative control and human-in-the-loop autonomy, addressing the challenge of maintaining stable path tracking during dynamic maneuvers. The platform enables safer, lower-cost, and more flexible experiments compared to full-scale testing, with stronger physical realism than simulations.
Vehicle platooning has attracted increasing attention as a promising approach to improve traffic efficiency, energy consumption, and roadway safety through coordinated multi-vehicle operation. A key challenge in platooning lies in maintaining stable and accurate path tracking during dynamic maneuvers such as lane changes, where lateral deviations and heading disturbances generated by the lead vehicle may propagate downstream to following vehicles. Robust longitudinal and lateral control systems are therefore essential not only for individual vehicle tracking performance, but also for overall platoon stability. For experimental studies, the Intelligent Mobility and Robotics Lab (IMRL) develops a scaled multi-vehicle platform for autonomous platooning research, with a particular emphasis on cooperative control and human-in-the-loop autonomy. This platform consists of one human-operable lead vehicle and two autonomous followers, enabling controlled and repeatable experiments on leader-follower coordination. Compared with full-scale field testing, this scaled platform offers a safer, lower-cost, and more flexible environment for rapid prototyping, controller validation, and multi-agent autonomy studies, while providing stronger physical realism than purely simulation-based evaluations.