Constrained Control for Heterogeneous Vehicle Platoons

Controlling platoons comprised of vehicles with heterogeneous dynamic ranges has gained interest in recent years. In particular, different dynamics in terms of actuation lag and saturation is still an open issue. In this paper, an approach is presented which exploits limitations introduced by vehicles downstream with more restricted dynamic range. For this purpose, a control scheme is developed based on the linearization of the transient response of key members of the platoon. Additionally, the transient performance in tracking a reference is separated from safety in terms of collision avoidance. To this end, the nominal linear control is augmented by enforcing constraints with zeroing control barrier functions.