String stability and guaranteed safety via funnel cruise control for vehicle platoons

TL;DR

This paper introduces a decentralized funnel control method for autonomous vehicle platoons that ensures safety distances, improves traffic flow, and guarantees string stability despite heterogeneity and nonlinear dynamics.

Contribution

It presents a novel decentralized control algorithm based on funnel control principles that guarantees safety and stability in heterogeneous vehicle platoons.

Findings

Ensures safety distance between vehicles

Achieves string stability of the platoon

Improves traffic flow in simulations

Abstract

We study decentralized control strategies for platoons of autonomous vehicles with heterogeneous and nonlinear dynamics. Based on ideas from funnel control, we present a novel decentralized control algorithm which is able to guarantee a safety distance between any two vehicles, a good traffic flow and it achieves string stability of the controlled platoon. We illustrate the performance of the controller by simulations of two extreme scenarios.