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.
@article{arxiv.1311.2095,
title = {Wave-absorbing vehicular platoon controller},
author = {Dan Martinec and Ivo Herman and Zdeněk Hurák and Michael Šebek},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1311.2095},
year = {2014}
}