Robust Control and Optimization for Autonomous and Connected Vehicle Platoons with Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication Delay

Abstract

Recent advances in vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication technologies enable autonomous vehicle platoons to better utilize the information of other members in the platoon to achieve the desired longitudinal intervehicular spacing specifications. However, most existing studies adopt a fixed time headway hw, and do not take into account the effects of V2V communication delay on the desired design specifications for the platoons. Moreover, for stability analysis, the commonly adopted Routh-Hurwitz approach usually needs a lot of computation time, which will significantly reduce the efficiency and flexibility of the platoons in real-time applications. In order to overcome the aforementioned issues with the existing results on autonomous vehicle platoons, this paper investigates the robust control and optimization problem for a platoon of autonomous and connected vehicles subject to V2V communication delay and uncertain parasitic actuation lag under a constant time headway policy (CTHP). First, by employing the Padé approximation approach, the spacing error propagation transfer function, from the preceding vehicle to the following vehicle, under immediate predecessor’s acceleration, velocity, and position feedback control mechanism is derived. In addition, in order to improve the computation efficiency, a signature method is utilized for the Hurwitz stability analysis. Then the string stability analysis for attenuating the spacing propagation error along the platoon is performed. Both lower and upper bounds for the time headway hw as well as the admissible sets for controller gains are achieved for Hurwitz stability and string stability. Comparative simulation results are finally provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design scheme.