Stochastic String Stability of Vehicle Platoons via Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control with Lossy Communication
For autonomous vehicle platooning, this work provides a control method robust to communication losses, a practical problem in real-world deployment.
The paper addresses vehicle platoon stability under lossy communication, proposing a switching controller that ensures string stability via an H∞ approach and minimizes error variance. Simulations show the controller compensates for high loss probabilities.
This paper is about obtaining stable vehicle platooning by using Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control when the communication is unreliable and suffers from message losses. We model communication losses as independent random events and we propose an original design for the cooperative controller, which mitigates the effect of losses. This objective is obtained by a switching controller that has a twofold objective: on the one hand, it promotes both plant stability and string stability of the average error dynamics by an $H_infty$ approach, and on the other hand it minimizes the variance around the average. We show by simulations that the proposed controller is able to compensate even for high probability of losses.