A Reachability Approach to Disturbance and Safety Propagation in Mixed Platoons

This work proposes a reachability approach to characterize how disturbances and safety propagate in a mixed platoon, i.e., a platoon with human-driven vehicles followed by a single automated vehicle. We look at the behavior of the leading vehicle as a unit-energy disturbance and study how this energy propagates along the states and the outputs of the system. To describe the propagation, we make use of ellipsoidal sets, and give conditions based on linear matrix inequalities to describe inclusion relations of these ellipsoidal sets. This analysis is extended to a synthesis tool, with the purpose of designing a control strategy for the automated vehicle that shapes the propagation of energy along the platoon in a desired way.