Journal
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON CONTROL SYSTEMS TECHNOLOGY
Volume 24, Issue 4, Pages 1253-1265Publisher
IEEE-INST ELECTRICAL ELECTRONICS ENGINEERS INC
DOI: 10.1109/TCST.2015.2483564
Keywords
Autonomous vehicles; decentralized control; platoon; scalability; stability margin
Funding
- Chinese National Programs for High Technology Research and Development through the Ministry of Science and Technology, China [2012AA111901]
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [51205228, 51575293]
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The platooning of autonomous vehicles has the potential to significantly improve traffic capacity, enhance highway safety, and reduce fuel consumption. This paper studies the scalability limitations of large-scale vehicular platoons moving in rigid formation, and proposes two basic ways to improve stability margins, i.e., enlarging information topology and employing asymmetric control. A vehicular platoon is considered as a combination of four components: 1) node dynamics; 2) decentralized controller; 3) information flow topology; and 4) formation geometry. Tools, such as the algebraic graph theory and matrix factorization technique, are employed to model and analyze scalability limitations. The major findings include: 1) under linear identical decentralized controllers, the stability thresholds of control gains are explicitly established for platoons under undirected topologies. It is proved that the stability margins decay to zero as the platoon size increases unless there is a large number of following vehicles pinned to the leader and 2) the stability margins of vehicular platoons under bidirectional topologies using asymmetric controllers are always bounded away from zero and independent of the platoon size. Simulations with a platoon of passenger cars are used to demonstrate the findings.
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