Experimental evaluation of cooperative adaptive cruise control with autonomous mobile robots

Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) is made possible with connected vehicles to achieve tight vehicle following. Vehicle-to-vehicle wireless communication can provide information that is not present using available in-vehicle sensors and can aid the development of better control strategies for following. Current theoretical and experimental studies have shown that CACC systems reduce the inter-vehicle headway as compared to Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) systems while guaranteeing string stability, i.e., gap-keeping error doesn't propagate throughout the platoon. This paper focuses on implementation of a CACC system on unmanned ground robots. The step response for the transfer function of the CACC system equals a step input and thus demands zero rise time. Our robot platooning experiment results have demonstrated the advantages of CACC over ACC in maintaining a small inter-vehicle headway.