Observer-based Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control of Vehicular Platoons with Random Network Access

This paper investigates cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) of vehicles, focusing on the effect of medium access control (MAC) protocol and the inaccurate acceleration measurement. A Markov chain is used to describe the randomness in vehicular network access under a MAC protocol; a reduced-order observer is proposed to estimate the relative acceleration of neighboring vehicles. Based on stochastic system techniques, a series of sufficient conditions are given in the form of backward recursive Riccati Difference Equations (RDE) to guarantee the stable tracking error. Numerical simulations are given to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.