Abstract
Vehicle platooning is a promising cooperative driving vision to mitigate issues in road transportation and it leverages on the use of distributed control systems to precisely control each vehicle in the fleet. This paper investigates a fully adaptive platoon control solution made possible by the advent of more reliable communication channels and off-board cloud computing systems. The components of the platoon control system, i.e., the platoon network topology and the distributed controllers, adapt based on the relative motion of the vehicles in the fleet, thus allowing the platoon to self-organise the interactions among the platoon members and the control gains to create and maintain the cooperative platoon motion. Furthermore, the adaptive mechanism to adjust the control gains is equipped with a σ-modification strategy to keep the control gains bounded in any working condition. Numerical results show the effectiveness of control method to make a heterogeneous platoon a self-organising network of intelligent vehicles, while also reducing the number of the communication links required to establish the cooperative motion.