Scalable Controller and Topology Co-Design for Automated Vehicle Platoons

This paper is concerned with the design problem of distributed cooperative longitudinal controller and communication topology for automated vehicle platoons subject to heterogenous and uncertain longitudinal dynamics. The main objective is to achieve automated vehicle platooning with desired spacing, same velocity/acceleration, and platoon robustness against uncertainties, while simultaneously incorporating appropriate topology synthesis. For this purpose, a scalable co-design approach is developed, whose salient features include that 1) local state observers are constructed for each platoon vehicle such that only raw vehicular position measurements are demanded; 2) the platoon controllers are capable to accommodate generic communication topologies and various spacing policies; 3) the design criteria on the existence of local state observers and platoon controllers can be verified in a fully offline manner and without requiring any global information regarding the communication topology or platoon scale, which means that the co-design is potentially implementable for practical platooning with a large scale and dynamic lengths; 4) a criterion on the topology link weight selections is established to provide an insight into the effects of the link weights on the platoon control performance. Finally, numerical simulations are given to substantiate the efficacy of the proposed co-design approach.