Cooperative adaptive cruise control with communication constraints

This paper investigates Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) for a group of vehicles with communication constraints such as communication delays, packet dropouts and disorders. In order to address the problem of the communication constraint, a novel data processing mechanism is proposed by structuring a Smart Data Processor (SDP). Under this mechanism each vehicle in the CACC system can successfully select the latest data packets of its former vehicle by using a logic Data Packet Processor and the matched ones of its own from its own from its Buffer. Based on these data packets, a new control law for each vehicle is given such that the control problem of the CACC system can be formulated as the stability problem of a class of systems with distributed time-varying delays. By employing Lyapunov-Krasoviskii functional method, a stability criterion guaranteeing the asymptotic and string stability of the CACC system can be obtained. Then, a sufficient condition for the controller design is de rived. A numerous simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed methods.