Formation Control for a Fleet of Autonomous Ground Vehicles: A Survey

Autonomous/unmanned driving is the major state-of-the-art step that has a potential to fundamentally transform the mobility of individuals and goods. At present, most of the developments target standalone autonomous vehicles, which can sense the surroundings and control the vehicle based on this perception, with limited or no driver intervention. This paper focuses on the next step in autonomous vehicle research, which is the collaboration between autonomous vehicles, mainly vehicle formation control or vehicle platooning. To gain a deeper understanding in this area, a large number of the existing published papers have been reviewed systemically. In other words, many distributed and decentralized approaches of vehicle formation control are studied and their implementations are discussed. Finally, both technical and implementation challenges for formation control are summarized.