A System Level Study of the Longitudinal Control of a Platoon of Vehicles

This paper presents a preliminary system study of a longitudinal control law for a platoon of nonidentical vehicles using a simplified nonlinear model for the vehicle dynamics. This study advances the art of automatic longitudinal control for a platoon of vehicles in the sense that it considers longer platoons composed of nonidentical vehicles; furthermore, the longitudinal control laws presented in this study take advantage of communication possibilities not available in the recent past. We assume that for i = 1, 2, . . . vehicle i knows at all times v_l and a_l (the velocity and acceleration of the lead vehicle) in addition to the distance between vehicle i and the preceding vehicle, i − 1. A control law is developed and is tested on a simulation of a platoon of 16 vehicles where the lead vehicle increases its velocity at a rate of 3 m.s⁻²; it is shown that the distance between successive vehicles does not change by more than 0.12 m in spite of variations in the masses of the vehicles (from the nominal), of communication delay and of noise in measurements.