Cooperative adaptive cruise control over unreliable networks: an observer-based approach to increase robustness to packet loss

Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) is nowadays a promising technique to increase highway through-put, safety and comfort for vehicles. Enabled by wireless communication, CACC allows a platoon of vehicles to achieve better performance than Adaptive Cruise Control; however, since wireless is employed, problems related to unreliability arise. In this paper, we design a digital controller to achieve platoon stability, enhanced by an observer to increase robustness against packet losses. A preliminary set of simulation results is presented, which confirms the interest of using an observer in combination with a local and cooperative digital controller.