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An important aspect of an automated highway system design is the synthesis of an automatic vehicle following system. Associated with automatic vehicle following systems is the problem of the stability of a string of vehicles, i.e., the problem of spacing error propagation, and in some cases, amplification upstream from one vehicle to another, due to some disturbance at the head of the string. Realistic vehicle following designs must also address parametric uncertainties such as mass of the vehicle, aerodynamic drag, and tire drag. The mass of the vehicle varies with the number of passengers. At small intervehicular separations, aerodynamic drag force changes significantly with the distance to be maintained. We address the problem of stability of a vehicle string in the presence of parametric uncertainty and present a Lyapunov-based decentralized adaptive control algorithm to compensate for such parametric variations. We examine this direct adaptive control algorithm for platoon performance and parameter convergence. We present the simulation results to demonstrate the effectiveness of the adaptive controller.
Swaroop et al. (Mon,) studied this question.