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Abstract-Nowadays, throughput has become a limiting factor in road transport. An effective means to increase the road throughput is to employ a small intervehicle time gap using automatic vehicle-following control systems. String stability, i.e., the disturbance attenuation along the vehicle string, is considered an essential requirement for the design of those systems. However, the formal notion of string stability is not unambiguous in literature, since both stability and performance interpretations exist. Therefore, a novel definition for string stability of nonlinear cascaded systems is proposed, using input-output properties. This definition is shown to result in well-known string stability conditions for linear cascaded systems. The theoretical results are experimentally validated using a platoon of six passenger vehicles equipped with cooperative adaptive cruise control.Index Terms-Cascaded systems, cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC), input-output stability, string stability, vehicle platoons.

Abstract-In the literature on dynamical systems analysis and the control of systems with complex behavior, the topic of synchronization of the response of systems has received considerable attention. This concept is revisited in the light of the classical notion of observers from (non)linear control theory.

Abstract-Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) allows for short-distance automatic vehicle following using intervehicle wireless communication in addition to onboard sensors, thereby potentially improving road throughput. In order to fulfill performance, safety, and comfort requirements, a CACC-equipped vehicle platoon should be string stable, attenuating the effect of disturbances along the vehicle string. Therefore, a controller design method is developed that allows for explicit inclusion of the string stability requirement in the controller synthesis specifications. To this end, the notion of string stability is introduced first, and conditions for L 2 string stability of linear systems are presented that motivate the development of an H ∞ controller synthesis approach for string stability. The potential of this approach is illustrated by its application to the design of controllers for CACC for one-and two-vehicle look-ahead communication topologies. As a result, L 2 string-stable platooning strategies are obtained in both cases, also revealing that the two-vehicle look-ahead topology is particularly effective at a larger communication delay. Finally, the results are experimentally validated using a platoon of three passenger vehicles, illustrating the practical feasibility of this approach.

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