Platooning of Heterogeneous Vehicles with Actuation Delays: Theoretical and Experimental Results

TL;DR

This paper introduces a prediction-based cooperative cruise control for heterogeneous vehicle platoons with actuation delays, including stability analysis and experimental validation on full-scale vehicles.

Contribution

It provides a stability analysis framework for discrete-time control of vehicle platoons with delays, validated through real-world experiments.

Findings

Stability conditions depend on sampling times and controller gains

Experimental results confirm theoretical predictions

Applicable to heterogeneous vehicle platoons with actuation delays

Abstract

In this paper we present a prediction-based Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Controller for vehicles with actuation delay, applicable within heterogeneous platoons. We provide a stability analysis for the discrete-time implementation of this controller, which shows the effect of the used sampling times and can be used for selecting appropriate controller gains. The theoretical results are validated by means of experiments using full scale vehicles. This is an extended version of a paper with the same title (submitted to IFAC TDS 2024). Additional mathematical details are provided in this extended version.