Platooning of Heterogeneous Vehicles with Actuation Delays: Theoretical and Experimental Results

In this paper we present a prediction-based Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Controller for vehicles with actuation delay, applicable within heterogeneous platoons. We provide a stability analysis for the discrete-time implementation of this controller, which shows the effect of the used sampling times and can be used for selecting appropriate controller gains. The theoretical results are validated by means of experiments using full scale vehicles. This is an extended version of a paper with the same title (submitted to IFAC TDS 2024). Additional mathematical details are provided in this extended version.