Design, Analysis, and Experimental Validation of a Distributed Protocol for Platooning in the Presence of Time-Varying Heterogeneous Delays

This paper presents a novel control design framework for vehicle platooning together with its experimental validation. The problem of controlling the vehicles within a platoon, so that they converge to their desired velocities and intervehicle distances, is formulated as a high-order network consensus problem. By means of Lyapunov-Razumikhin functions, convergence is proven of the platoon to the desired consensus speed and intervehicle spacing under both fixed and switching communication network topologies, thus confirming the capability of the proposed approach to cope with maneuvers where vehicles join or leave the platoon and communication failures. Tuning criteria for the control gains are provided to guarantee string stability under the proposed control law. Finally, results of numerical simulations and in-vehicle experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in a three-vehicle platoon.