On Practical Implementations of Connected Vehicles: The Issue of Acceleration Feedback

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) is one of the most studied platooning algorithms for connected vehicles. Despite its popularity, available studies neglect an important practical aspect of CACC: because the control input is a desired acceleration, existing CACC algorithms require an acceleration-hold loop, fed by accelerometer measurements that are noisy in practice. This work proposes new classes of CACC strategies that, while avoiding any feedback from the accelerometer, guarantee the same properties of existing designs. Theoretical properties are proven in terms of stability and string stability. Numerical tests, also performed in the open-source CARLA platooning toolbox named OpenCDA (cooperative driving automation), are provided to validate the theoretical properties of the design and the improved performance against noisy measurements.