Periodic Event-Triggered CACC and Communication Co-design for Vehicle Platooning

Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) based vehicle platooning can increase the safety and efficiency of traffic. This work looks into the communication and control problems of vehicle platooning, and proposes a control and communication co-design for CACC. First, an integrated radar system is presented. This system integrates sensing of relative position, speed, and communication between a predecessor and its follower. Second, a working scheme for the integrated radar system is presented. This scheme allows the radar systems to switch periodically between different working modes without interferences from other modes. Therefore, the relative position, speed, and communication can be asynchronously periodically updated to the controller. Third, a periodic event-triggered control approach is presented. This approach allows asynchronous periodic sampling of the output, and is deeply co-designed with the radar system and its working scheme. Delays are also considered in the control approach. The co-design CACC approach can guarantee the vehicle platoons to be string stable. A numerical example has shown the feasibility of the approach.