Practical results of a longitudinal control concept for truck platooning with vehicle to vehicle communication

Practical results of a longitudinal control concept for truck platooning are presented. The approach is based on distance measurement between the vehicles and on vehicle to vehicle communication but does not need road infrastructure. A two layered control structure is proposed. The inner control loop includes a nonlinear acceleration controller linearizing a large part of the nonlinearities. Despite this linearisation, due to the different actuator systems the dynamic behaviour of the vehicle is different during acceleration and braking. Furthermore, each vehicle may have different power trains and loads and additional disturbances might occur. Therefore, a robust platoon controller is introduced for the outer control loop by use of sliding mode control design. Practical results of a platoon consisting of 7 trucks show that by use of the proposed control concept string stability can be achieved