Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control for Vehicle Platoon Using a New Spacing Policy

In this paper, we propose a new spacing policy that integrates the conventional CS (Constant Spacing) and CTH (Constant Time Headway) into one for a vehicle platoon’s cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC). To achieve excellent vehicle distance control performance and string stability simultaneously, the bidirectional vehicle-to-vehicle communication topology is adopted such that each vehicle receives the positions, velocities, and accelerations from both the adjacent predecessor and successor vehicles, by onboard sensors and/or wireless communication. The vehicle dynamics is a second-order nonlinear dynamic motion equation and a local robust controller is designed for each vehicle. The string stability of the platoon and the robust stability of the overall cooperative control system are analyzed theoretically. And finally, simulation studies are performed to support the theoretical insights.