Abstract: In order to improve the traffic efficiency and the road safety, this paper studied the formation control of intelligence vehicles in highway environment. The combination of the artificial potential field and the virtual leader method was adopted to control vehicles. Taking the ideal road formation as the goal, the elliptical virtual force scope of virtual leader was proposed and the formation unit model was established under the condition of considering the longitudinal and horizontal safety distance of formation and the highway environment security constraints. Then, the stability of the unit model was proved by Lyapunov function. In order to improve the formation flexibility and eliminate the position errors of vehicles, the decomposition-iterative idea was introduced to the multi-vehicle formation control, and the vertical and horizontal iterations of formation units were set up according to road conditions. Taking the six-vehicle formation as the simulation verification example, the result of simulation shows that the formation model can stably and effectively control vehicles to achieve the ideal highway formation.

Key words: intelligent vehicles; highway environment; formation control; artificial potential field; virtual leader