Improving the Design of Linear Controllers for Platooning under Disturbances

This paper addresses the challenge of longitudinal platooning control for homogeneous vehicles subjected to internal and external disturbances, including wind gusts, road slopes, and parametric uncertainties. The goal is to maintain a constant distance between neighboring vehicles in a decentralized manner. To achieve this, we propose an enhanced control law that incorporates the integral of the spacing error when computing acceleration commands. This improvement enables the controller to effectively reject steady-state disturbances. We establish formal conditions for the controller synthesis under general look-ahead and bidirectional topologies. Finally, experiments using non-linear vehicle models in the high-fidelity CARLA simulator validate the effectiveness of our approach.