Remote-Controlled Vehicle Platooning via State Estimation in a Communication Network

In this paper, a platoon merging control system is considered as a remotely located system with state represented by a stochastic process. In this system, it is common to encounter situations where a single decision maker controls a large number of subsystems, and observation and control signals are sent over a communication channel with finite capacity and significant transmission delays. Unlike classical estimation problem where the observation is a continuous process corrupted by additive noise, there is a constraint that the observation must be coded and transmitted over a digital communication channel with finite capacity. A recursive coder-estimator sequence is a state estimation scheme based on observations transmitted with finite communication capacity constraint. In this paper, we introduce a stochastic model for the lead vehicle in a platoon of vehicles in a lane considering the angle between the road surface and a horizontal plane as a stochastic process. In order to merge two platoons, the lead vehicle of the following platoon is controlled by a remote control station. Using the coder-estimator sequence, the remote control station designs the feedback controller. The simulation results show that the inter-vehicle distance and the deviation from the desired inter-vehicle distance are well regulated.