On the Design of Nonlinear Distributed Control Protocols for Platooning Systems

In this letter, we introduce a novel sufficient condition for the stability of acyclic directed networks subject to time- and state-dependent disturbances. Such a condition, which essentially characterizes the behavior of the network in terms of the solutions of its unperturbed dynamics, is applied to address the problem of designing distributed control protocols for vehicle platooning. Specifically, we show how it can be used to design both linear and nonlinear distributed control protocols for the stable platooning of a network of automated vehicles. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach via a representative example.