Slotcars for Vehicular Platooning

We describe a mature project aiming at development of an affordable experimental platform for research in vehicular platooning. It consists of several autonomously controlled slotcars. We equipped each off-the-shelf slotcar with an onboard computer (the popular Raspberry Pi Compute Module) as well as with numerous sensors that make the car capable of measuring its own velocity, acceleration, and distances to its nearest neighbors (both ahead and behind). Onboard wireless communication interface (wifi) allows to include in the control computations also the states and controls of other vehicles, in particular the leader of the platoon. All data are wirelessly transferred to an operator PC for convenient visualization and offline analysis (in Matlab, for example). The platform currently serves to demonstrate various platoon control strategies, such as predecessor following, (a)symmetric bidirectional control or cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC). The experiments with the platform demonstrate all the known effects of the platoon dynamics such as string instability. In fact, thanks to fast dynamics of the slotcars, these effects are even more pronounced than with real-size vehicles, hence the platform constitutes a challenging experimental benchmark for theoretical research in vehicular platooning. Indeed, the primary motivation behind this development was to offer to the control systems community an affordable yet physically relevant and realistic means to verify and demonstrate theoretical findings in vehicular platooning with experimental data. Thus all the source code, schematics and component lists are made publicly available. More information is at the project's webpage on hackaday.io web page https://hackaday.io/project/19087-slotcars-for-vehicular-platooning.