Throttle Control for Vehicle Following

Throttle control design is an important part of Automated Vehicle Control System (AVCS). In this paper we design some throttle control schemes for vehicle following under constant time headway spacing policy. The schemes maintain a steady state inter-vehicle spacing decided by a desired time headway set by the driver. One verified nonlinear longitudinal vehicle model is used for simulations and test. The vehicle is assumed to be equipped with sensors which can detect relative distance, relative speed and absolute vehicle speed. No communication between vehicles is assumed. Three control schemes, a fixed PID, a PID with gain scheduling, and an adaptive PID, are proposed and tested and their performance is evaluated.