We give a method for designing a mechanical impedance to suppress the propagation of disturbances along a chain of masses. The key feature of our method is that it is scale free. This means that it can be used to give a single, fixed, design, with provable performance guarantees in mass chains of any length. We illustrate the approach by designing a bidirectional control law in a vehicle platoon in a manner that is independent of the number of vehicles in the platoon.
@article{arxiv.1802.07040,
title = {Scale Free Bounds on the Amplification of Disturbances in Mass Chains},
author = {Richard Pates and Kaoru Yamamoto},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1802.07040},
year = {2018}
}