Decentralized control of a large platoon of vehicles operating on a plane with steering dynamics

This paper studies the decentralized control of a large platoon of identical vehicles which are moving on a plane, where each vehicle is assumed to have steering dynamics; each vehicle in this case is assumed to be described by a 6th order model and has two inputs: traction force and steering angle. A study of the string stability of the resulting platoon is made; in particular, it is shown that a decentralized controller consisting of non-identical controllers can be used to control the platoon such that it possesses string stability. An example of a 200-vehicle platoon is included to illustrate the results which can be obtained.