Cooperative adaptive cruise control: An artificial potential field approach

In this paper, in addition to the main functionality of vehicle following, cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) is enabled with additional features of gap closing and collision avoidance. Due to its nonlinear nature, a control objective such as collision avoidance, cannot be addressed using a linear controller such as a PD controller. However, the artificial potential functions can be adopted to design controllers which accommodate multiple (nonlinear) control objectives in a single design. By defining an appropriate control law, the system state is always driven to the minima of the designed potential function which guarantees the required performance of the system.