Design of string stable adaptive cruise controllers for highway and urban missions

In this paper, we focus on cooperative adaptive cruise control of ground vehicles and platoon stability in daily traffic. The general adaptive cruise control (ACC) structure and different cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) approaches are discussed for highway platooning, considering case studies for a Grand Cooperative Driving Challenge (GCDC) program the authors involved in. The hardware design and the low level control strategy for braking, throttle and gearshift actuators for these case studies are presented. Finally, the performance of a PD based CACC algorithm used in GCDC is analyzed.