Platoon Control of Connected Vehicles under Intermittent Communication Constraints

This paper investigates the problem of platoon control for connected vehicles with intermittent communications among neighboring vehicles. A vehicle can receive the state information from its neighboring vehicle(s) only when the communication link between them is active. This paper proposes a platoon control law for each follower vehicle based on intermittently received relative state information from neighboring vehicles. A sufficient condition ensuring cooperative tracking of the leader vehicle is derived by using graph theory, non-smooth analysis and average system approach. Then, conditions for achieving string stability are derived. Based on these conditons, a platoon controller design algorithm is provided. Finally, the effectiveness of the platoon control methodology is illustrated by numeric simulations.