Output-Feedback Design of Longitudinal Platooning With Adaptive Disturbance Decoupling

In longitudinal platooning, ‘disturbance decoupling’ refers to the problem of making the inter-vehicle spacing independent of the disturbance input from the preceding vehicle, while ‘adaptive’ refers to handling vehicle parametric uncertainty such as engine time constant. This letter constructs a platooning architecture to achieve disturbance decoupling and adaptive goals without absolute position and relative velocity feedback, required in the state of the art. The interest in targeting disturbance decoupling is to have string stability (attenuation of disturbances along the platoon) as a by-product, as well as a decentralized design that helps handling parametric uncertainty. Stability analysis is provided along with numerical simulations.