String Stability Preserving Adaptive Spacing Policy for Handling Saturation in Heterogeneous Vehicle Platoons

The saturation problem in heterogeneous vehicle platoons is considered. With leader and predecessor following control architecture, actuator saturation in a vehicle causes its followers to collide due to their link with the faster leader vehicle. A modification of the actual leader and predecessor following control method is proposed that automatically detects the saturation of other vehicles ahead, and reconfigures the tracking strategy to avoid collisions. The method is based on the construction of a virtual spacing policy for a virtual predecessor vehicle model. The proposed controller does not require additional measurements or extra communication, and is designed to satisfy string stability requirements. The results are verified by simulation examples. (C) 2017, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.