An overview of vehicular platoon control under the four-component framework

The platooning of autonomous ground vehicles has potential to largely benefit the road traffic, including enhancing highway safety, improving traffic utility and reducing fuel consumption. The main goal of platoon control is to ensure all the vehicles in the same group to move at consensual speed while maintaining desired spaces between adjacent vehicles. This paper presents an overview of vehicular platoon control techniques from networked control perspective, which naturally decomposes a platoon into four interrelated components, i.e., 1) node dynamics (ND), 2) information flow topology (IFT), 3) distributed controller (DC) and, 4) geometry formation (GF). Under the four-component framework, existing literature are categorized and analyzed according to their technical features. Three main performance metrics, i.e. string stability, stability margin and coherence behavior, are also discussed.