Abstract
This paper describes the design of a vehicle following controller that tracks the trajectory of the vehicle ahead with prescribed inter-vehicle distance. The authors consider autonomous vehicle following without any information obtained from road infrastructure or communicated from the lead vehicle. Assuming that the leader linear and angular velocities, as well the curvature radius of the path traveled by the lead vehicle, are unknown constant parameters, an adaptive tracking controller is proposed with only the current inter-vehicle relative position and orientation available for feedback control. Simulation results are included to illustrate the performance of the proposed controller.