Platooning with Actuation Delays: an Alternative Spacing Policy

We present a controller design for vehicle platoons that does not require vehicle-to-vehicle communication, but can be deployed using only measurements of on-board sensors. We use an extended spacing policy to derive a controller that also fulfills the control objective with respect to the commonly adopted constant-headway spacing policy. For this controller, we derive conditions for stability in the presence of actuation delays, and present sufficient conditions for string stability. We demonstrate for a heterogeneous platoon with parameters obtained from three types of experimental vehicles how these conditions can be used to determine appropriate headways and controller gains. Simulations confirm the controller is able to achieve string stable behavior at small headways, without requiring V2V communication.