Equipping Vehicular Platoons With Partial-State Immersion and Invariance Adaptation

This work discusses how a large set of longitudinal vehicular platooning protocols proposed in the literature can be augmented, in the framework of immersion and invariance (I&I), with adaptation and partial-state feedback capabilities. The need for adaptation stems from uncertainty and heterogeneity of the vehicle driveline time constants; the need for partial-state feedback stems from tradeoffs in the intervehicle sensing technology. The presented I&I designs yield disturbance decoupling, a system-theoretic property guaranteeing string stability and collision avoidance specifications, crucial in platooning. The proposed protocols are discussed analytically and validated using different traffic scenarios in the Simulation of Urban MObility-Veins (SUMO-Veins) platform for vehicular networks and using data from a traffic smoothing field experiment.