String Stable Vehicle Platooning Using Adaptive Cruise Controlled Vehicles

摘要

Vehicle grouping in platoons and their automated control lead to reduced distances between vehicles with benefits in terms of increasing the capacity of roads and decreasing the fuel consumption and pollutant emissions. Reducing the distance must be done in compliance with safety rules, a condition being the string stability of the interconnected vehicles that make up the platoon. This paper presents a Linear Quadratic Integral Regulator for homogeneous platoon of ACC vehicles, which can guarantee the desired tracking performance and string stability requirement. By introducing a double integrator in the control law, tracking performance is obtained and a heuristic method is proposed for string stability by the selection of the constant time headway (CTH). The CTH selection for string stability is based on the Nyquist diagram and the pole-zero map of the transfer function of the spacing errors between two adjacent vehicles. The method was used for the comparative analysis of the string stability of autonomous vehicles using two ACC structures based on position and, respectively, on distance.