Leader-following consensus in vehicle platoons with an inter-vehicle communication network

We consider the problem of controlling a platoon of vehicles in which each vehicle tries to maintain a fixed distance from its predecessor, which is an instance of the so-called “string stability” problem. Our model includes a communication network among the platoon of vehicles and an associated leader-following consensus protocol. We derive the sufficient conditions, in terms of communication topology and control parameters, for string stability by using the leader-following consensus algorithm. Comparison of our proposed algorithm with previously proposed control methods in literature shows that ours is a generalization that encompasses previous approaches as special cases obtained by assuming specific communication topologies. Simulation results and performance in terms of disturbance propagation are also given, showing that the proposed leader-following consensus protocol leads to almost the same level of performance as the previous approaches, while the proposed algorithm has additional advantages of scalability, robustness and distributed implementation.