An Observer-based Longitudinal Control of Car-like Vehicles Platoon Navigating in an Urban Environment

In this paper, we study longitudinal motion controlof car-like vehicles platoon navigating in an urban environmentwith minimum communication links. To achieve a higher trafficflow, a constant-spacing policy between successive vehicles iscommonly used but this is at a cost of an increased number ofcommunication links as any vehicle information must broadcastto all its followers. Therefore, we propose a distributed observer-based control law that depends both on communicated andmeasured information. Our formulation allows designing thecontrol law directly in the curvilinear coordinates. Internal andstring stability analysis are conducted. We provide simulationresults, through dynamic vehicular mobility simulator, to illus-trate the feasibility of the proposed approach and corroborate our theoretical findings.