Vehicle Platooning With Non-Ideal Communication Networks

Abstract

The performance and effectiveness of a vehicle platoon rely on the topology of information flow and quality of communications, such as delays and dropouts. In this paper, we investigate the homogeneous and constant-time-headway-spacing-policy-based vehicle platoon longitudinal control problem, where communication impairments including the limited communication range, random packet losses, and time-varying communication delays are considered. Here, internal stability characterizes the system stability without disturbance while string stability is concerned with the error amplification when the vehicle platoon is affected by external disturbances. First, for the case when each vehicle utilizes the position, velocity, and acceleration information of multiple preceding and following vehicles, we obtain sufficient conditions to guarantee the internal stability of the vehicle platoon system based on the stability of matrix polynomials and the matrix eigenvalue perturbation theory. Then, considering random packet losses, we find that the effectiveness of platoon control relies on the frequency of packets being successfully received, or the delay till a new packet is received. We also obtain the upper bound for delays on all communication links such that the internal stability of the vehicle platoon can still be maintained when time-varying communication delays are within the bound. The $L_2$ -string stability is also analyzed through the transfer function for both ideal communication cases, and cases with uniform and constant delays. Extensive simulink-based numerical results validate our analysis, which reveals how communication impairments affect platoon control with a realistic information flow topology.