IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Vol.49, No.10, 1835-1841, 2004
Disturbance propagation in vehicle strings
This note focuses on disturbance propagation in vehicle strings. It is known that using only relative spacing information to follow a constant distance behind the preceding vehicle leads to string instability. Specifically, small disturbances acting on one vehicle can propagate and have a large effect on another vehicle. We show that this limitation is due to a complementary sensitivity integral constraint. We also examine how the disturbance to error gain for an entire platoon scales with the number of vehicles. This analysis is done for the predecessor following strategy as well as a control structure where each vehicle looks at both neighbors.