Improved Lateral Stability for Unmanned Ground Vehicle Convoys

This work will address the problem of deviations of unmanned vehicle convoy followers by developing a method to estimate the parameters of the disturbances that cause lateral deviations from the desired vehicle trajectory. These parameters will be estimated each time a vehicle passes over a section of terrain. These spatially dependent estimates of the disturbance parameters will then be passed to the next vehicle in the convoy line. This next vehicle will then use the estimated disturbances to better drive the current section while also refining the estimated disturbance parameters. Each time a vehicle passes over the same section of terrain, the parameter estimations will be improved and the lateral deviation of each successive follower will be reduced. This will not only reduce the lateral deviations of the rear vehicles in the convoy but will also ensure that the vehicles in the rear of the convoy have better parameter estimates than those that went before.