Wave-absorbing vehicular platoon controller

Abstract

The paper tailors the so-called wave-based control popular in the field of flexible mechanical structures to the field of distributed control of vehicular platoons. The proposed solution augments the symmetric bidirectional control algorithm with a wave-absorbing controller implemented on the leader, and/or on the rear-end vehicle. The wave-absorbing controller actively absorbs an incoming wave of positional changes in the platoon and thus prevents oscillations of inter-vehicle distances. The proposed controller significantly improves the performance of platoon manoeuvrers such as acceleration/deceleration or changing the distances between vehicles without making the platoon string unstable. Numerical simulations show that the wave-absorbing controller performs efficiently even for platoons with a large number of vehicles, for which other platooning algorithms are inefficient or require wireless communication between vehicles.

Transients of platoons with asymmetric and different Laplacians

“…an additional one based on the travelling wave concept in distributed control [10]. Asymptotic instability can be caused by the travelling wave which is amplified as it travels in the formation.…”

“…Similarly to [19], we would like to obtain the signal velocity in our circular system (10). By [19,Lem.…”

On the Necessity of Symmetric Positional Coupling for String Stability

“…Paralely, the wave concept was considered for the control of continuous flexible structures in [17] and [18]. Recently, the travellingwave approach was applied on distributed control in [19], [20] and [21].…”

A travelling wave approach to a multi-agent system with a path-graph topology

“…The wave-based description leads to irrational transfer functions, analysis of which differs in several aspects from their rational counterparts [2]. This paper continues in the research started in [17], where waves in a platoon of identical vehicles were considered. A natural extension of this model is to consider a chain of nonidentical (heterogeneous) agents.…”

“…If the first agent changes its output, then all fol-$ The research was supported by the Czech Science Foundation within the project GACR 16-19526S. * Corresponding author Email addresses: dan.martinec@fel.cvut.cz (Dan Martinec), ivo.herman@fel.cvut.cz (Ivo Herman), sebekm1@fel.cvut.cz (MichaelŠebek) lowing agents sequentially respond to this change. If we study their response from the local point of view [21,17,28] we can notice that the change is propagated as a wave. The wave departs from the first agent and travels along the system to the last agent, where it reflects and travels back.…”