Data‐driven cooperative adaptive cruise control for unknown nonlinear vehicle platoons

Abstract This article studies cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) for vehicle platoons with consideration of the unknown nonlinear vehicle dynamics that are normally ignored in the literature. A unified data‐driven CACC design is proposed for platoons of pure automated vehicles (AVs) or of mixed AVs and human‐driven vehicles (HVs). The CACC leverages online‐collected sufficient data samples of vehicle accelerations, spacing, and relative velocities. The data‐driven control design is formulated as a semidefinite program that can be solved efficiently using off‐the‐shelf solvers. Efficacy of the proposed CACC are demonstrated on a platoon of pure AVs and mixed platoons with different penetration rates of HVs using a representative aggressive driving profile. Advantage of the proposed design is also shown through a comparison with the classic adaptive cruise control (ACC) method.