Leaderless Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control Based on the Constant Time-Gap Spacing Policy

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) in leaderless scenario is addressed in this article. The common idea in CACC is that a leader vehicle determines the steady-state speed of the platoon without considering feedback from other vehicles. The main contribution of this article is to propose a control strategy such that each vehicle in a leaderless platoon keeps a desired distance from its preceding vehicle, determined based on the constant time-gap spacing policy, and simultaneously, all the vehicles reach consensus upon their speeds. Moreover, whereas each vehicle needs access to the information of some neighboring vehicles (via a communication network) to achieve speed consensus, we assume that it has access to the relative distance of just one possible preceding vehicle (using a radar/lidar). Simulation results illustrate the performance of the proposed control strategy.