Cooperative Predictive Control for Mixed Vehicle Platoons on Curved Roads

This paper studies the cooperative control problem for a mixed vehicle platoon composed of connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) and human-driven vehicles (HDVs) running on curved roads. Firstly, we propose a distributed model predictive control (DMPC) algorithm for each following CAV in the platoon to maintain a constant speed and a constant inter-vehicle travelling path length along the curved road, where delayed trajectories of preceding vehicles are utilized as the reference. Considering the fact that HDVs in the platoon are inevitably subject to uncertainty due to drivers’ behaviors, simply following the preceding HDV’s trajectory may lead to undesirable behaviors, and hence we introduce a trajectory correction mechanism based on centerline of the path to correct the vehicle trajectory reference in the DMPC algorithm. This enables the closed-loop mixed vehicle platoon control system to achieve the desired inter-vehicle traveling path length and desired speed on curved roads. Finally, numerical simulation results are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed DMPC algorithm for the mixed vehicle platoon.