Bidirectional Platoon Control of Arduino Cars with Actuator Saturation and Time-varying Delay

Abstract

The concept of the bidirectional platoon control system is developed, which enjoys significant advantages over present day adaptive cruise control systems in terms of string stability, tracking safety and fuel economy. A novel bidirectional platoon control system model is established, in which the effect of engine time uncertainty, time-varying actuator delay (including fuelling delay and braking delay) and actuator saturation is involved. Based on the new model, a H_? controller is presented that can robustly stabilize the vehicular platoon system only use information from their immediate neighbors. The theoretical results in this paper show that the proposed system would be able to safely maintain a smaller inter-vehicle spacing and would be bidirectional string stable. The effectiveness and advantage of the presented methodology are demonstrated by both numerical simulations and experiments with laboratory scale Arduino cars.