Nonlinear Adaptive Cruise Control of Vehicular Platoons

TL;DR

This paper introduces nonlinear adaptive cruise controllers for vehicle platoons that ensure safety, stability, and efficiency, with proven guarantees and demonstrated effectiveness through numerical simulations.

Contribution

It presents a novel nonlinear control design for platoons that guarantees collision avoidance, stability, and string stability, advancing adaptive cruise control technology.

Findings

Guarantees collision avoidance and bounded speeds.

Proves global asymptotic stability of the platoon.

Demonstrates controller effectiveness via numerical example.

Abstract

The paper deals with the design of nonlinear adaptive cruise controllers for vehicular platoons operating on an open road or a ring-road. The constructed feedback controllers are nonlinear functions of the distance between successive vehicles and their speeds. It is shown that the proposed novel controllers guarantee safety (collision avoidance) and bounded vehicle speeds by explicitly characterizing the set of allowable inputs. Moreover, we guarantee global asymptotic stability of the platoon to a desired configuration as well as string stability. Certain macroscopic properties are also investigated. The efficiency of the nonlinear adaptive cruise controllers is demonstrated by means of a numerical example.