Comparison of Two Control Strategies for Platoons with Communication Losses

This paper presents a comparison between two strategies to deal with data loss in a platoon of vehicles. We consider an homogeneous multi-agent LTI system comprised of vehicles using a predecessor follower topology and a constant time headway policy. Each agent in the string sends its current position to the immediate follower through a lossy channel modeled as a Bernoulli process. To maintain the speed of a vehicle in the event of communication loss, two control strategies are analyzed. When the data of the predecessor is not available, a first strategy uses the previously received data to estimate the lost position, while the other protocol uses the previously calculated control law. For both cases, we aim to analyze how the lossy channels affect the string stability and the overall behavior of the platoon. Through simulation results, we present the statistics of the position error and the tracking performance for different probabilities of losses and values of the time headway constant.