Integrated Vehicle-Following Control for Four-Wheel-Independent-Drive Electric Vehicles Against Non-Ideal V2X Communication

Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) have attracted tremendous interests worldwide. Four-Wheel-Independent-Drive Electric Vehicles (FWID EVs) have the potential of improving vehicle handling performance and energy consumption. In this paper, an integrated vehicle-following control scheme for FWID EVs with Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X) communication capability is proposed to account for nonideal communication such as time-varying delays and packet dropouts. A packet dropout compensator is put forward to compensate for V2X information loss. A longitudinal controller with a delay compensator is then synthesized and integrated with a lateral model predictive controller to enable vehicle-following control. The stability of the proposed controller is validated theoretically and experimentally under comprehensive driving scenarios through Hardware-In-the-Loop tests. The results demonstrate that the proposed controller has good vehicle-following performance against nonideal V2X communication. This attests to its competency for being used in vehicle platoon control.