Observer Based Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control for Heterogeneous Vehicle Platoons with Actuator Delay

Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) has the potential to increase road throughput and safety. By utilizing vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication, string stability can be achieved at short inter-vehicle distances. This paper presents a decentralized control approach suitable for heterogeneous platoons with drivetrain delays. By approximating the plant with delay during the controller design, a controller is obtained that ensures string stable behavior and has a nominal performance similar to an approach where the delay is compensated by a Smith predictor. The controller presented in this paper has the added benefit that the feedback action can be determined directly by measured signals and the error converges to zero in steady state situations. By combining the controller with an acceleration observer and error observer, undesired effects of measurement noise are mitigated.