Mistuning-based control design to improve closed-loop stability margin of vehicular platoons

We consider a decentralized bidirectional control of a platoon of N identical vehicles moving in a straight line. The control objective is for each vehicle to maintain a constant velocity and inter-vehicular separation using only the local information from itself and its two nearest neighbors. Each vehicle is modeled as a double integrator. To aid the analysis, we use continuous approximation to derive a partial differential equation (PDE) approximation of the discrete platoon dynamics. The PDE model is used to explain the progressive loss of closed-loop stability with increasing number of vehicles, and to devise ways to combat this loss of stability.