Vehicle Platoon Formation Using Interpolating Control

Automatic platooning of vehicles on freeways has potential to increase traffic throughput. In this paper, a control design approach known as Interpolating Control is used for the task of forming vehicle platoons. The objective is to regulate the vehicles’ speeds and the spacings between the vehicles, from their initial conditions into a shared consensus. A discrete state space formulation, with state and control constraints, is used to model the system, and the Interpolating Control approach is implemented and compared with other methods such as MPC. Simulation results suggest that the Interpolating Control approach can serve as an alternative to the MPC approach, for the task of platooning, especially when designing robust controllers for systems with model parameter uncertainty.