A safe stable directional vehicular platoon

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of platoon control. The stability and the string stability of a platoon of vehicles in the simultaneous presence of the time delay and the lag are investigated. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, the paradigm of the cluster treatment of characteristic roots is utilized in order to reveal the stabilizing parametric regions in the domain of the delays to render the stability of a closed-loop system. Second, the restrictions which need to be imposed on the control parameters are considered in order to make the vehicle behave monotonically in the forward direction without collision as well as the requirement for the string stability. Finally, an example of multiple-vehicle platoon control is presented, which demonstrates the effectiveness and the robustness of the proposed method.