Safe and Operationally Efficient Longitudinal Control of Autonomous Truck Platoons

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hammerl, Alexander, Seshadri, Ravi, Rasmussen, Thomas Kjær, Nielsen, Otto Anker
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Hammerl, Alexander
Seshadri, Ravi
Rasmussen, Thomas Kjær
Nielsen, Otto Anker
author_facet Hammerl, Alexander
Seshadri, Ravi
Rasmussen, Thomas Kjær
Nielsen, Otto Anker
contents This paper presents a hierarchical longitudinal control architecture for autonomous truck platoons that jointly addresses safety, string stability, and economic efficiency. The framework integrates a high-rate safety projection filter, a spacing-regulation layer based on a lag-aware proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller, and a slow-timescale economic optimizer balancing fuel consumption and travel time. The safety layer guarantees collision avoidance under bounded actuation delays by enforcing forward invariance of a velocity-aware headway constraint through a high-order control barrier function. The regulation layer shapes the spacing-error dynamics into a second-order form with interpretable parameters for damping and natural frequency while explicitly accounting for actuator lag. At the macroscopic level, fuel use is modeled by a tractive-power relation that captures aerodynamic benefits of close spacing, enabling a long-term optimization of speed trajectories subject to comfort and energy trade-offs. We show that the closed-loop dynamics converge to the Optimal Velocity Model with Relative Velocity (OVRV) under undisturbed conditions and derive worst-case upper bounds for platoon stabilization time. Numerical case studies demonstrate the superiority of the proposed design over an canonical baseline controllers in both transient behavior and long-term energy efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_12336
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Safe and Operationally Efficient Longitudinal Control of Autonomous Truck Platoons
Hammerl, Alexander
Seshadri, Ravi
Rasmussen, Thomas Kjær
Nielsen, Otto Anker
Optimization and Control
This paper presents a hierarchical longitudinal control architecture for autonomous truck platoons that jointly addresses safety, string stability, and economic efficiency. The framework integrates a high-rate safety projection filter, a spacing-regulation layer based on a lag-aware proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller, and a slow-timescale economic optimizer balancing fuel consumption and travel time. The safety layer guarantees collision avoidance under bounded actuation delays by enforcing forward invariance of a velocity-aware headway constraint through a high-order control barrier function. The regulation layer shapes the spacing-error dynamics into a second-order form with interpretable parameters for damping and natural frequency while explicitly accounting for actuator lag. At the macroscopic level, fuel use is modeled by a tractive-power relation that captures aerodynamic benefits of close spacing, enabling a long-term optimization of speed trajectories subject to comfort and energy trade-offs. We show that the closed-loop dynamics converge to the Optimal Velocity Model with Relative Velocity (OVRV) under undisturbed conditions and derive worst-case upper bounds for platoon stabilization time. Numerical case studies demonstrate the superiority of the proposed design over an canonical baseline controllers in both transient behavior and long-term energy efficiency.
title Safe and Operationally Efficient Longitudinal Control of Autonomous Truck Platoons
topic Optimization and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12336