Establishing Platoons of Bidirectional Cooperative Vehicles With Engine Limits and Uncertain Dynamics

In adaptive platooning strategies proposed inliterature to handle uncertain and nonidentical uncertain vehicledynamics (uncertain heterogeneous platoons) two aspects requir-ing proper design are neglected:bidirectional interaction amongvehicleswhich might lead to loss of string stability, andenginesaturation constraintswhich might lead to loss of cohesiveness.This work proposes a novel adaptive platooning strategy handlingthese two crucial aspects. Specifically, bidirectional interactionis handled by designing bidirectional reference dynamics withproven string stability properties, to which the uncertain het-erogeneous platoon should homogenize; engine constraints arehandled via a proposed a mechanism that makes such referencedynamics ‘not too demanding’, by properly saturating theiraction. The saturation action will allow all vehicles in the platoonto not hit their engine limits, preserving cohesiveness. Simulationsare conducted to validate the theoretical analysis and showthe effectiveness of the method in retaining cohesiveness of theplatoon.Index Terms— Cooperative adaptive cruise control, engineconstraints, bidirectional communication, heterogeneous platoon