Observer-based Consensus Protocol of Vehicles Platooning with Time Delay

In this paper, we investigate the cooperative control problem of vehicle platooning with time delay and without knowing the velocity of the leading vehicle. To tackle this issue, an observer with time delay is presented to observe the velocity of the leading vehicle, and a distributed control algorithm based on the observed velocity is proposed. With the help of the frequency-domain method, the sufficient conditions for internal stability are obtained. In addition, the string stability is analyzed under the predecessor-leader following (PLF) topology. Numerical experiments are given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed observer and the control algorithm.