Extended Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control

In this paper the Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control strategy for vehicles platooning is extended to the case when each vehicle can communicate with a subset of vehicles in the fleet. The control objective is to guarantee that the fleet moves forward with a given spacing policy at the leader velocity. To this aim each vehicle decides its control action using information from all neighboring vehicles through wireless communication. In so doing, a network of dynamical systems is formed, and it is shown that achieving platooning is equivalent to find a control algorithm so that the resulting network is asymptotically stable. A network protocol able to deal with heterogeneous time-varying communication delays is then proposed to solve the problem. A consistent proof of stability of the closed-loop system is provided and numerical results confirm the effectiveness of the approach and its robustness with respect to variations of the leader velocity, as well as to generic topologies of the underlying network emerging from the communication features.