Data‐iteration cooperative adaptive cruise control of mixed heterogeneous vehicle platoons with unknown dynamic characteristics

Abstract This paper considers the cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) problem of mixed heterogeneous vehicle platoons composed of human‐driven and CACC vehicles with unknown dynamic characteristics and an alternative to CACC for platooning of the heterogeneous vehicle platoon is presented. Adaptive dynamic programming is firstly used to learn the dynamic characteristics of acceleration of vehicles from the sampled data. Then the data‐iteration optimal CACC controller is computed to ensure that each CACC vehicle can reach a desired inter‐vehicle distance and desired common velocity with no prior knowledge of the dynamics of vehicles in the mixed platoon. Moreover, the string stability of the mixed vehicle platoon is derived by establishing some sufficient conditions on the acceleration transfer function of adjacent vehicles. Two simulation experiments of a six‐vehicle mixed platoon are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed CACC method.