Vehicles Swarm Intelligence: Cooperation in both Longitudinal and Lateral Dimensions

Longitudinal-only platooning methods are facing great challenges on running mobility, since they may be impeded by slow-moving vehicles from time to time. To address this issue, this paper proposes a vehicles swarming method coupled both longitudinal and lateral cooperation. The proposed method bears the following contributions: i) enhancing driving mobility by swarming like a bee colony; ii) ensuring the success rate of overtaking; iii) cruising as a string of platoon to preserve sustainability. Evaluations indicate that the proposed method is capable of maneuvering a vehicle swarm to overtake slow-moving vehicles safely and successfully. The proposed method is confirmed to improve running mobility by 12.04%. Swarming safety is ensured by a safe following distance. The proposed method's influence on traffic is limited within five upstream vehicles.