Development and evaluation of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Controllers

In this paper, we present a Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) system consists of several autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs). Using vehicle to vehicle communication, the designed cooperative controller could minimize inter vehicle spacing, meanwhile, guarantee the platoon's stability. We use mainly two algorithms to design our longitudinal controllers to the problem, a frequency domain approach and controller based on model predictive control. In order to validate the effectiveness of the proposed method, we conduct simulations on a simulated environment by coupling Matlab with Carsim. Simulation results show capabilities of all the designed controllers could make the vehicle follow a vehicle ahead of it at a desired safety distance.