Otonom araçlar için formasyon kontrolü: Tasarım ve deneysel değerlendirme

Research on fully-autonomous vehicles is a rising trend in the 21st century, since it is a promising area in which developments will be able to reduce work load of humans. As a specific research problem, studies on formation control theory have been done in the most recent years for fleets of autonomous vehicles in order to transform the way of transporting goods and individuals. This study focuses on a nonlinear virtual vehicle based controller, which is one of the formation control strategies in the literature. Since the existing work uses a kinematic vehicle model, this thesis extends the existing work to a dynamic bicycle car model, which is more realistic. Specifically, instead of assuming that the longitudinal and angular vehicle velocity can be directly applied as control inputs, the thesis designs controllers in order to track desired longitudinal and angular velocities provided by the formation controller. In a simulation study, the thesis compares the results of the kinematic and dynamic vehicle model, concluding that the formation control is satisfactory for the dynamic model if the designed controllers are tuned properly.