Entrainment and vehicle following controllers design for autonomous intelligent vehicles

Entrainment and vehicle following controllers are proposed for autonomous intelligent vehicles in both non-tight and tight vehicle following manoeuvres. A nonlinear vehicle model is used for designing the controllers. The proposed vehicle following controller is designed based on a constant time headway policy; whereas, the proposed entrainment controller is designed based on a k-factor headway policy. The proposed vehicle following controller not only provides local individual vehicle stability but also guarantees asymptotic platoon stability without the availability of feed forward information. Furthermore, the achieved asymptotic platoon stability is shown to be theoretically robust with respect to sensor delays. Computer simulations demonstrate the performance of the proposed controllers.