Controller Design for CACC with Time-varying Communication Delays

Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) aims at the safe and comfortable travel of vehicles at short distances in the form of platoons. Hereby, it is generally desired to attenuate disturbances along vehicles in a platoon, which is captured by different string stability conditions. In this paper, we focus on L-infinity string stability. This condition ensures reducing the magnitude of the acceleration signal along the platoon, which helps to avoid actuator saturation and increases driving comfort. Since the performance of CACC is adversely affected by time-varying communication and actuator delays, we develop the first controller design method for L-infinity-string stability, combining the Lyapunov-Krasovskii method and our custom bisection algorithm. Simulation experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.