Dynamic Switching Control of Vehicle Platoon with Kalman Filter Compensator Considering Communication Delays and Packet Dropouts

This paper presents a dynamic switching control strategy for vehicle platoons to address communication delays and packet dropouts in connected and autonomous vehicle systems. The proposed strategy combines adaptive cruise control (ACC), cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC), and a Kalman filter to compensate for time-varying delays, while employing an equidistant spacing policy to support reliable information flow within the platoon. A switching mechanism based on an acceleration threshold enables seamless transition between ACC, which depends on onboard sensor data, and CACC, which relies on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. This design reduces dependence on V2V communication, thereby lowering the risk of packet dropouts and improving platoon stability. The control architecture adopts a hierarchical structure: an upper-level sliding mode controller generates desired acceleration commands, and a lower-level PID controller converts them into throttle and brake actions. A Kalman filter is further applied to predict and compensate for sensor and communication delays, where time-varying delays are modeled using a Bernoulli random process. Simulation studies on a five-vehicle platoon show that the proposed strategy effectively suppresses speed fluctuations and maintains safe inter-vehicle distances. Compared with cases without delay compensation, spacing deviations are reduced by 72.4% and velocity deviations by 59.6%. These results demonstrate the potential of the proposed method to improve platoon control under non-ideal communication conditions.