Provably Safe Cruise Control of Vehicular Platoons
This work addresses the problem of provably safe longitudinal control for autonomous vehicle platoons, which is critical for practical deployment of autonomous driving systems.
The paper develops safe cruise control policies for autonomous vehicle platoons that guarantee collision avoidance and bounded platoon length/speed under disturbances, using set-invariance theories. Both centralized and distributed policies are proposed, with numerical examples provided.
We synthesize performance-aware safe cruise control policies for longitudinal motion of platoons of autonomous vehicles. Using set-invariance theories, we guarantee infinite-time collision avoidance in the presence of bounded additive disturbances, while ensuring that the length and the cruise speed of the platoon are bounded within specified ranges. We propose (i) a centralized control policy, and (ii) a distributed control policy, where each vehicle's control decision depends solely on its relative kinematics with respect to the platoon leader. Numerical examples are included.