Autonomous platoon control with multiple disturbances

This paper concerns multiple disturbance propagation in a platoon of vehicles that consists a leader and many followers. It is known that a small disturbance acting on leader or some follower may cause large effect on other vehicles, and even propagates incrementally along the platoon. To make the effect of disturbances as far as possible little, we design a control law that uses only information of vehicle itself and its immediate predecessor, and derive the string stability conditions and the upper bounds of the transfer function matrix G_de from disturbances to spacing errors as well as the transfer function matrix G_ue from leader input control to spacing errors. These derived bounds are independent of the number of the platoon. Simulations verify the proposed method is effective.