Direct Homography Control for Vision-Based Platooning

Abstract

This paper introduces a vision-based Controller for automatic vehicle following, also known as 2-vehicle platooning. A direct homography controller is applied to calculate the motion demand for an autonomous vehicle from only the data of a monocular camera. The direct control without an intermediate step to a Cartesian representation increases the robustness of the scheme. A robustness analysis of the closed loop controller is provided using the parameter space approach. Furthermore, the direct homography controller is extended by an estimation of the absolute angular difference to the goal position, which then enables the estimation of the position error. The proposed homography-based Position estimation is tested on rendered camera images for better evaluation of the underlying error and the platooning controller is verified in simulation. Finally, the results of both are presented.