Vehicle Platooning with Multiple Vehicle Look-ahead Information

Abstract

In this work, we consider the effects of multiple vehicle look ahead in a vehicle platoon that employs a constant spacing policy (CSP) based controller in the presence of parasitic lags. We first consider a CSP controller for longitudinal dynamics that uses position, velocity and acceleration from ‘r’ predecessor vehicles. We demonstrate string instability with a CSP when information from ‘r’ preceding vehicles is used. We do this by considering the spacing errors to be states of a spatially discrete system and use perturbation analysis to show that the platoon is string unstable. We also consider a robustly string stable CSP controller that employs information from the leader and immediate predecessor, and determine an upper bound on the maximum allowable parasitic lag.