Control and communication for automated driving

Cruise control capabilities are currently embedded in a wide range of road vehicles. More recently, researchers and engineers are considering the opportunity to introduce additional coordination capabilities, so that vehicles can perform collective motion tasks with limited or no human intervention. One of such tasks is platooning, that is, the ability to form a tight line of vehicle moving together “as one”: using controlled vehicle platooning for enhancing road transport is becoming a challenge for the contemporary automotive industry. The main objective of this thesis will be the joint modeling, analysis and design of control and communication algorithms for tasks of coordinated cruise control. We expect that this holistic approach will lead to improved performance, in terms of accuracy and reliability, compared to decoupled approaches