Adaptive multi-agents synchronization for collaborative driving of autonomous vehicles with multiple communication delays

The development of automated and coordinated driving systems (platooning) is an hot topic today for vehicles and it represents a challenging scenario that heavily relies on distributed control in the presence of wireless communication network. To actuate platooning in a safe way it is necessary to design controllers able to effectively operate on informations exchanged via Inter-Vehicular Communication (IVC) systems despite the presence of unavoidable communication impairments, such as multiple time-varying delays that affect communication links. To this aim in this paper we propose a novel distributed adaptive collaborative control strategy that exploits information coming from connected vehicles to achieve leader synchronization and we analytically demonstrate its stability with a Lyapunov-Krasovskii approach. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is shown via numerical simulations in PLEXE, a state of the art IVC and mobility simulator that includes basic building blocks for platooning.