Refinement of a bidirectional platooning controller by wave absorption at the leader

The paper tailors the so-called wave-based control known in the field of flexible mechanical structures to the problem of distributed control of vehicular platoons. The proposed solution is based on refinement of the popular symmetric bidirectional distributed controller which enables the platoon leader to actively absorb any incoming (backwards running) wave of positional changes in the platoon. In order to accomplish this, the platoon leader only needs to measure the distance to its immediate follower. This minor augmentation results in significant attenuation of undesirable long transients during the platoon manoeuvres like acceleration/deceleration or during the commanded change of the inter-vehicle distances. Numerical simulations show that the wave-absorbing controller works efficiently even for platoons with a very large number of vehicles and outperforms the known platoon control schemes such as predecessor following or bidirectional control algorithm.