Robust String Stabilization of Connected Vehicles With Jerk Feedforward

This article investigates the effect of communicated jerk on string stabilization of connected vehicles with uncertain parasitic actuation lags. First, by feeding forward the jerk of the preceding vehicle through vehicle-to-vehicle communication, a modified cooperative adaptive cruise control law is formulated. Second, the corresponding governing equation that characterizes the propagation of the intervehicular spacing errors along the stream is deduced. Based on the resultant intervehicular spacing error propagation equation, the robust internal stability criterion is first derived. Then, the robust string stability condition is elaborated together with a co-design procedure developed for the coupled control gains and the time headway with respect to the model uncertainty bounds in a stepwise decoupling manner. In addition, utilizing the established dependent relation of the feasible time headway on the control gains, the conditions such that the implementable time headway with jerk feedforward is smaller than the lower bound of the time headway for the case without jerk feedforward are obtained. An illustrative example and comparative numerical simulations are finally provided to corroborate the effectiveness of the achieved theoretical results.