Experimental Demonstration of Platoon Formation Using a Cooperative Merging Controller

Road safety and traffic congestion are amongst the main challenges in current transportation systems. Literature shows that these challenges can be tackled using cooperative platoons, which is a technique in which vehicles use communication to drive closely behind each other in a string. An important topic of research regarding cooperative platoons is merging vehicles into a platoon at highway on-ramps. In previous work, the authors proposed a control strategy for the merging of a single cooperative automated vehicle into a platoon of vehicles at highway on-ramps. In this paper, the performance of this controller is demonstrated using experiments with two full-scale vehicles. During these experiments a two-vehicle platoon is formed in a limited distance. Several scenarios with different trajectories of the preceding vehicle are investigated. The preceding vehicle can be accelerating or decelerating simulating disturbances encountered in a larger platoon. In all experiments, the maneuver is successfully executed. The results of these experiments show the large potential of the proposed merging controller.