Safe and Efficient Cooperative Platooning

Cooperative automotive platooning can improve safety and efficiency on the road. Look-ahead control of an entire platoon allows to reduce fuel consumption and travel time in open road scenarios, but dense traffic requires continuous adaptation of far-sighted plans. To achieve efficient individual vehicle control, these control systems need to be informed appropriately. For this purpose a novel concept for distributed model predictive control of the platoon vehicles is proposed which safely allows dense spacing and keeps communication requirements small while being robust against communication loss. A safety-extension separates safety constraints from the design of the tracking control goals and enables agreed-upon behavior in terms of temporarily limited decelerations. Driving corridors based on position errors are utilized to select suitable control modes or trigger prediction updates to following vehicles. Realistic vehicle dynamics co-simulations demonstrate the platoon safety and performance in selected scenarios, including emergency braking and maneuver tracking subject to traffic disturbances. The proposed measures are effective with realistic model errors, provide implicit collision safety and show string stability with low communication requirements.