Adaptive Optimal Control of Heterogeneous Vehicle Platoons With Bidirectional Communication and Uncertain Dynamics

Controlling platoons of heterogeneous vehicles is a relevant field of research. In terms of platoon architecture, many approaches to harness inter-vehicle communication to develop cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) systems have been investigated. For instance, optimal control has proven to yield high performance results. Yet, heterogeneity in vehicle dynamics over a platoon poses many challenges. For real world application, one major issue is the uncertainty of model parameters. Furthermore, differences in lagged response to a control input degrade performance criteria such as tracking and cohesion of a vehicle string. Adjusting the spacing with both the preceding and the succeeding vehicles using bidirectional communication can potentially improve the platoon cohesiveness and is crucial when considering the synchronized merging scenario. In this paper, an adaptive optimal controller is presented which relies on bidirectional platoon communication and deals with parameter uncertainties. Along with the adaptive optimal controller synthesis and string stability analysis, effectiveness of the controller is verified in a simulation example.