Experimental Validation on Connected Cruise Control With Flexible Connectivity Topologies

In this paper, we investigate experimentally the impact of connected automated vehicles on the dynamics of vehicle chains with different connectivity topologies. We utilize a scaled connected vehicle testbed consisting of ground robots that can mimic the dynamics of human-driven and connected automated vehicles. We derive analytical conditions for stability and disturbance attenuation (i.e., string stability) while taking into account digital effects and delays and validate the corresponding stability diagrams experimentally. The flexibility and robustness of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) based longitudinal control among human-driven vehicles is evaluated for different connectivity topologies and the impacts of connected automated vehicles on traffic flow are highlighted.