Vehicles Platooning in Urban Environment: Consensus-based Longitudinal Control with Limited Communications Capabilities

In this research, a general control framework for platooning in urban environment is proposed. A consensus-based control law is described taking into account the nature of traveling in urban environment, that is the human driven leader travels with variable velocity. In addition, the proposed control law does not depend on the predecessor velocity, which in turn allows us to utilize a low cost limited bandwidth communication module by using a sensor-based link for predecessor distance and a communication-based link for leader's information. A constant-spacing policy is used to get a high capacity flow of vehicles. The control system is analyzed and conditions for both internal and string stability are set. The efficiency of the proposed framework and control law is verified via numerical analysis.