Abstract
The paper describes two different approaches to the problem of lateral vehicle control in an automotive platoon. Firstly, there is the lane keeping approach, that uses information on the position of the vehicle relative to the lane boundaries to control the vehicle in lateral direction. Secondly, the tow-bar approach is introduced in two variants. Both are fully independent from infrastructure and use patterns on the back of the preceding vehicle to determine the lateral position of every following vehicle in a platoon. Furthermore, a combination of the lane keeping and the tow-bar principle is suggested, which seems to be viable for a stable lateral platoon control.