This thesis describes the design of a vision-based vehicle-following system that uses only on-board sensors to enable a convoy of follower vehicles to autonomously track the trajectory of a manually-driven lead vehicle. The tracking is done using the novel concept of a constant time delay, where a follower tracks the delayed trajectory of its leader. Two separate controllers, one linearized about a point ahead and the other linearized about a constant-velocity trajectory, were designed and tested in simulations and experiments. The experiments were conducted with full-sized military vehicles on a 1.3 km test track. Successful field trials with one follower for 10 laps and with two followers for 13.5 laps are presented.

This thesis describes the design of a vision-based vehicle-following system that uses only on-board sensors to enable a convoy of follower vehicles to autonomously track the trajectory of a manually-driven lead vehicle. The tracking is done using the novel concept of a constant time delay, where a follower tracks the delayed trajectory of its leader. Two separate controllers, one linearized about a point ahead and the other linearized about a constant-velocity trajectory, were designed and tested in simulations and experiments. The experiments were conducted with full-sized military vehicles on a 1.3 km test track. Successful field trials with one follower for 10 laps and with two followers for 13.5 laps are presented.