A novel cooperative adaptive cruise control approach: Theory and hardware in the loop experimental validation

In this paper we propose and experimentally validate within an ad hoc Hardware In the Loop (HIL) environment a novel approach for the control of a fleet of vehicles. In particular, the Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) for vehicles platooning is extended to the case when, due to the recent advances on vehicular wireless technologies, each vehicle can communicate not only with its follower but also with a subset of vehicles in the fleet. In so doing, a network of dynamical system emerges, and it is shown that the platooning problem is equivalent to find a control algorithm so that the resulting network is asymptotically stable. It is analytically shown that the decentralized control algorithm guarantee exponential stability despite heterogeneous time-varying communication delays which are unavoidable when wireless protocol are used. Finally, experimental results show the effectiveness and the robustness of the control approach also to variations of the leader velocity, as well as to generic topologies of the underlining network emerging from the communication features.