Structural Intelligent Platooning by a Systematic LQR Algorithm

Abstract: Oil price has rapidly increased in the past centuries and made the fuel consumption a hot topic in the transport business. This was also emphasized by a study made by the heavy duty vehicle manufacturer, Scania CV AB, who concluded that one third of their operational cost could be related to the fuel consumption. An alleviation to this problem might be to form a platoon of vehicles. This will not only increase the capacity of the traffic flow but also decrease the fuel consumption due to the slipstream effect that occurs behind traveling objects. Control has already been developed to handle fixed intermediate distances within a platoon of vehicles and is referred to as Automatic Intelligent Cruise Control in the vocabulary of the manufacturers. However none of these existing regulators are taking the slipstream effect into concern and is therefore not suitable for the purpose of fuel reduction by vehicle platooning. By paying regards to this particular effect the complexity of the dynamics is increased and new more sophisticated regulators are necessary. In this thesis a new distributed regulator is proposed which is able to take the slipstream effect into concern using linear quadratic regulation. This regulator maintains the present informational topology where each vehicle is able to measure the distance as well as the velocity to the vehicle ahead. Through simulations it is shown that the regulator is able to cope with realistic scenarios, a systematic decrease of error throughout the platoon has been observed and robustness has been proven.