Longitudinal Spacing Control of Vehicles in a Platoon

The Lyapunov stability theorem is used to derive a control law that can be used to control the spacing between vehicles in a platoon. A third order system is adopted to model the vehicle and power-train dynamics. In addition, the concept of "Expected Spacing Error" is introduced and used to form a Lyapunov function. Then a control law that always decreases the Lyapunov function is selected. A platoon of four vehicles and various scenarios are used to demonstrate the performance of the proposed control law. Simulation results show that the slinky effects are essentially removed and the robustness to the uncertainty of vehicle dynamics is substantially improved over previous results.