Distributed Consensus Control of Homogeneous Vehicle Platoons With Bidirectional Communication

Vehicle platooning is deemed a promising solution to improve traffic safety, reduce fuel consumption and increase traffic throughput and road capacity. Road throughput can be increased by driving at small inter-vehicle distances. Adjusting the spacing with both the preceding and the succeeding vehicles using bidirectional communication improves the cohesion of a vehicle string.. In this paper, a distributed consensus controller is presented which relies on bidirectional platoon communication. Along with the consensus-based controller synthesis, vehicle stability, and an extended string stability analysis, the effectiveness of the controller is demonstrated in a simulation study.