Vehicular platooning experiments with racing slot cars

The paper reports on an affordable platform for indoor experimental verification of algorithms for distributed control of platoons of vehicles. The platform is based on commercially available racing slot cars (by Carrera) equipped with an on-board 32-bit microcontroller-based control system. The assembled PCB board was provided by Freescale Semiconductor, Rožnov pod Radhoštěm, Czech Republic, within their Freescale Race Challenge 2012 competition of individual autonomous slot cars organized for student teams in Czech and Slovak republics. The documentation is freely available online. Some extra components such as an infrared range sensor and a wireless communication module have been added to the original system. The capabilities and potentials of the proposed platform are demonstrated on platooning experiments using two of the most popular platoon control schemes: predecessor following and leader following. Some technical parameters of the platform as well as design experience are shared in the report. It is hoped to encourage other teams to build a similar setup and possibly expose their new distributed control algorithms to an experimental competition.