Robust cooperative adaptive cruise control design and implementation for connected vehicles

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) is a developing technology that achieves reduced inter-vehicle distance following in order to increase roadway capacity. CACC provides much lower headway values than adaptive cruise control (ACC) or human drivers can; however, this relies on real-time acceleration data, which inherently has inexact timing. In order to implement a string stable CACC platoon following scheme, meaning that disturbances are attenuated down the stream of the platoon of vehicles, while also overcoming the inherent challenges of wireless communication and uncertain internal model parameters, we design an H∞ controller that is robust to all aforementioned uncertainties. We implement this controller on a laboratory-scale test bed with an anti-windup compensation scheme and particularly show that the controller design is able to account for communication shortcomings.