Nonlinear Control of Heterogeneous Vehicle Platoon with Time-varying Delays and Limited Communication Range

Vehicle platooning can significantly increase throughput of transportation, while the impairment of communication may affect the control performance of vehicle platooning. Communication delays are inevitable in the process of driving, which will cause the instability of the platoon. Moreover, the transmission power level between vehicles is finite, resulting in a limited communication range. A nonlinear control algorithm is proposed where the car-following interactions between vehicles are considered. First, a third-order heterogeneous dynamic model is established for vehicles in the platoon. The control gains and parameters are heterogeneous. Then considering the constant time headway spacing policy and the gap supplement, conditions of the control gains for maintaining the internal stability of the platoon are obtained. Second, with time-varying communication delays taken into account, the allowed upper bound of communication delays is derived. Third, given the ability of each vehicle to receive information from multiple predecessors and followers, conditions of string stability are obtained, where the communication range is limited. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.