Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control for Heterogeneous Platoons With Delays: Controller Design and Experiments

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) has the potential to increase road throughput and safety. To achieve full deployment of CACC on highways, controllers should be able to deal with heterogeneities in the vehicle string. Moreover, actuation delays have shown to be detrimental to the performance of controllers in such settings. In this article, we present a controller design for heterogeneous platoons, where the ego vehicle experiences an actuation delay in the driveline. The proposed controller does not require driveline information of the preceding vehicle, yielding a control approach suitable for heterogeneous platoons. Moreover, no constraints are imposed on the ordering of the delays throughout the platoon. We derive input-to-state stability conditions for the closed-loop system with delay and analyze the string stability properties of the system, taking into account both actuation and communication delay. The proposed controller is experimentally validated with a platoon consisting of two vehicles.