Effects of speed saturation in a predecessor-following vehicle platoon

Abstract

In this paper we perform a numerical study of the effect of speed saturation in a platoon of autonomous vehicles. In particular, the work is centered around studying the string stability of the platoon considering said speed limit. For this we will consider that each vehicle has the same dynamical description and that the desired inter-vehicle spacing depends on the speed of each agent. The analysis is done in discrete time and, besides the saturations, we assume that that the dynamics of the local control loops are linear time invariant. As a result, we illustrate numerically how the error due to said saturations may propagate along the string, losing the string stability property of the multi-agent system. We also illustrate that the undesireable effects of the saturation may be mitigated when a simple anti- windup scheme is incorporated to deal with them.