This paper focuses on disturbance propagation in vehicle strings. It is known that using only relative spacing information to follow a constant distance behind the preceding vehicle leads to string instability. Specifically, small disturbances acting on one vehicle can propagate and have a large effect on another vehicle. We show that this limitation is due to a complementary sensitivity integral constraint. We also examine how the disturbance to error gain for an entire platoon scales with the number of vehicles. This analysis is done for the predecessor following strategy as well as a control structure where each vehicle looks at both neighbors.

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In this note, we define a notion of mesh stability for a class of interconnected nonlinear systems. Intuitively mesh stability is the property of damping disturbance propagation. We derive a set of sufficient conditions to assure mesh stability of "look-ahead" interconnected systems. Mesh stability is shown to be robust with respect to structural and singular perturbations. The theory is applied to an example of formation flying.

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