Design of vehicle following control systems with actuator delays

Actuator delays can substantially degrade the performance of vehicle following control. In this paper, we investigate the control design problem of vehicle following systems with actuator delay. The main requirement in designing such systems is to ensure the stability of the individual vehicle and that there are no slinky-effects in the platooning. Based on Lyapounov's method, we first construct a constant bound for the time delay to guarantee the individual vehicle stability. Next, we derive a condition for achieving no slinky-effects. Finally, we prove that the proposed control laws can achieve zero steady state errors