Cooperative Driving With a Heavy-Duty Truck in Mixed Traffic: Experimental Results

Abstract

This paper describes the implementation and testing of a Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) strategy on a heavy-duty truck. The adopted control strategy utilizes additional information exchange through wireless communication to improve the vehicle-following behavior achieved by the underlying adaptive cruise controller (ACC). The control method is evaluated in a mixed traffic condition. It is shown that the truck can perform smooth predecessor following in most of the test scenarios, even for small intervehicle distances. Furthermore, the results demonstrate how string stability is affected by wireless communication imperfections and acceleration (deceleration) limitations of the heavy-duty truck in an inhomogeneous platoon.