The accomplishments to date on the development of automatic vehicle control (AVC) technology in the Program on Advanced Technology for the Highway (PATH) at the University of California, Berkeley, are summarized. The basic prqfiiples and assumptions underlying the PATH work are identified, 'followed by explanations of the work on automating vehicle lateral (steering) and longitudinal (spacing and speed) control. For both lateral and longitudinal control, the modeling of plant dynamics is described first, followed by development of the additional subsystems needed (communications, reference/sensor systems) and the derivation of the control laws. Plans for testing on vehicles in both near and long term are then discussed.

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This paper presents a preliminary system study of a longitudinal control law for a platoon of nonidentical vehicles using a simplified nonlinear model for the vehicle dynamics. This study advances the art of automatic longitudinal control for a platoon of vehicles in the sense that it considers longer platoons composed of nonidentical vehicles; furthermore, the longitudinal control laws presented in this study take advantage of communication possibilities not available in the recent past. We assume that for i = 1, 2, . . . vehicle i knows at all times vl and al (the velocity and acceleration of the lead vehicle) in addition to the distance between vehicle i and the preceding vehicle, i − 1. A control law is developed and is tested on a simulation of a platoon of 16 vehicles where the lead vehicle increases its velocity at a rate of 3 m.s−2; it is shown that the distance between successive vehicles does not change by more than 0.12 m in spite of variations in the masses of the vehicles (from the nominal), of communication delay and of noise in measurements.