Control of Leader-Following Vehicle Platoons With Varied Communication Range

This article investigates the control problem for leader-following (LF) vehicle platoons with a constant-spacing policy, where the information of the leader is broadcast to each follower via vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) subject to varied communication ranges. According to the connectivity status between the leader and each follower, platoon control is modeled as a switched platoon control system with a connectivity-status-matrix-dependent controller. By using switched system theory, a series of sufficient conditions are obtained as a criteria for the stability analysis and control synthesis of the LF platoon. Based on the obtained conditions, a useful platoon control algorithm is proposed. For each obtained connectivity-status-matrix-dependent controller, the string stability and a zero steady-state spacing error can be guaranteed by additional conditions. Numerical simulations and experiments with laboratory-scale Arduino cars are conducted to verify the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed algorithm.