Control and Reorganization of Heterogeneous Vehicle Platoons after Vehicle Exits and Entrances

Platoons are efficient solutions to improve road transportation, traffic throughput, and other demands. But problems such as environmental disturbances, network imperfections, and unaware surrounding vehicles increase the necessity for resilient methods that ensure stability and connectivity among the platoon members. Hence, in this paper, we study the problem of decentralized control for platoons of heterogeneous vehicles under a limited communication range with a constant spacing policy. The goals are to guarantee inter-vehicle distances in steady-state, and resourcefulness to overcome entrances and exits of vehicles. Our main result is a resilient strategy, composed of a reconfiguration protocol and some simple rules for tuning the control law, based on local information about the relative connectivity to neighbors. It guarantees, in a decentralized manner, the automatic reorganization of the platoon under the entry and exit of agents. We conclude by illustrating our approach with simulated experiments on platoons with different numbers of vehicles, and by comparing it with the current state-of-the-art.