Virtual truck platooning implementation in Unity

Abstract: Vehicle platooning is a technology that has gained attention from vehicle manufacturers in recent years. The interest lies mainly in the potential benefits this technology can bring. With the help of computer simulations, manufacturers can test how platoons behave under certain circumstances without having to spend money on building actual physical prototypes. By using the Unity game engine, an already existing simulation of a platoon is first visualized, letting all of the physics be controlled outside of Unity. Then the task is to explore the built in physics of Unity by either applying forces to vehicles or torques to the wheels. The results show that the simulations did not act as expected during these two test cases. This is mainly due to some limitations in precision of the underlying physics engine.