Cooperative driving of mixed autonomy vehicles: A delay-compensating MPC approach

The era of mixed autonomy when connected automated vehicles and human-driven vehicles co-exist will last a long time. Communication time delays are inevitable and may highly deteriorate the safety and stability of mixed vehicle platoons in dynamic tracking scenarios. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a model predictive control (MPC) method for cooperative control of mixed platoons with time-varying communication delays. The detriments of time delay to cooperative control are analyzed and two delay compensation mechanisms are established, based on which a dual-mode MPC controller is designed. The feasibility, closed-loop stability, and head-to-tail string stability are theoretically proved. Furthermore, numerical simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed MPC controller. Simulation results show that the proposed controller outperforms the state-of-the-art consensus-based controller with 4.5%-5.8% fuel consumption reduction and 28.1%-33.1% average velocity error reduction.