Abstract

This paper presents RUPU, a low-cost scaled-down experimental platform for deployment and experimental testing of strategies to deal with the lateral and longitudinal control problems in path-following vehicle platooning. The platform represents a line-following platooning configuration with agents in a string formation following a line in the path, capturing the essence of the underlying control problems. This avoidsthe need for complex lane detection and path-planning algorithms, reducing the cost ofsensors and processing hardware. The platform provides agents equipped with sensing, actuating, and computing hardware to perform autonomous navigation over a flat surface.They also include wireless communication interfaces for cooperative platooning schemes,user interaction and remote monitoring. To illustrate the potential of RUPU, we perform a set of experiments and demonstrate its capability to perform repeatable and reproducible experiments for validating existing theoretical results and testing of new approaches for platooning control.