  This paper deals with the lateral control of a convoy of autonomous and
connected following vehicles (ACVs) for executing an Emergency Lane Change
(ELC) maneuver. Typically, an ELC maneuver is triggered by emergency cues from
the front or the end of convoy as a response to either avoiding an obstacle or
making way for other vehicles to pass. From a safety viewpoint, connectivity of
ACVs is essential as it entails obtaining or exchanging information about other
ACVs in the convoy. This paper assumes that ACVs have reliable connectivity and
that every following ACV has the information about GPS position traces of the
lead and immediately preceding vehicles in the convoy. This information
provides a "discretized" preview of the trajectory to be tracked. Based on the
available information, this article focuses on two schemes for synthesizing
lateral control of ACVs based on(a) a single composite ELC trajectory that
fuses lead and preceding vehicle's GPS traces and (b) separate ELC trajectories
based on preview data of preceding and lead vehicles. The former case entails
the construction of a single composite ELC trajectory, determine the
cross-track error, heading and yaw rate errors with respect to this trajectory
and synthesize a lateral control action. The latter case entails the
construction of two separate trajectories corresponding to the lead vehicle's
and preceding vehicle's data separately and the subsequent computation of two
sets of associated errors and lateral control actions and combining them to
provide a steering command. Numerical and experimental results corroborate the
effectiveness of these two schemes.
