Vehicle platooning schemes considering V2V communications: A joint communication/control approach

This article addresses communication and control aspects of platooning systems with the related challenges introduced by the overlap of both areas. The main objective is to provide a dynamic control mechanism where the parameters of the well-known Predicted Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (PCACC) are adapted based on the observed quality of the V2V (Vehicle-to-Vehicle) communication links. Different from the state of the art, our main design goal is the minimization of inter-vehicular distances while being robust in terms of an extremely low probability of emergency braking. A new adaptive control scheme based on the offline optimization of the control gains is proposed. We evaluate the new approach in a highway scenario and show the improvements obtained by the dynamic adaptation of the control parameters over static control strategies.