# Adaptive Control of Heterogeneous Platoons with Guaranteed Collision Avoidance

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel adaptive control framework for heterogeneous vehicle platoons that guarantees collision avoidance for actual dynamics by employing a virtual platoon concept and set-theoretic adaptive laws.

## Contribution

It presents a new adaptive control approach that ensures collision avoidance in heterogeneous platoons, extending beyond reference dynamics to actual vehicle behavior.

## Key findings

- Ensures collision avoidance for actual platoon dynamics.
- Uses virtual platoon concept for analysis without interaction.
- Provides Lyapunov-based stability and convergence proofs.

## Abstract

This work proposes a framework for Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control of a vehicular platoon characterized by unidirectional communication and heterogeneous parameters. In the proposed framework, the actual (heterogeneous) platoon is made to converge to a reference (homogeneous) platoon via adaptive laws designed using of set-theoretic model reference adaptive control. Yet, in contrast to the state-of-art that is based on ensuring collision avoidance on the reference platoon dynamics only, the approach we propose can ensure collision avoidance on the actual platoon dynamics. This result is possible thanks to the introduction of a novel concept of virtual platoon, only used for analysis, but that does not interact with the actual platoon. The stability and convergence properties of the proposed framework are established using Lyapunov-based analysis in conjunction with the aforementioned virtual platoon concept.