Safe and robust data-driven cooperative control policy for mixed vehicle platoons

This article considers mixed platoons consisting of both human-driven vehicles (HVs) and automated vehicles (AVs). The uncertainties and randomness in human driving behaviors highly affect the platoon safety and stability. However, most existing control strategies are either for platoons of pure AVs, or for special formations of mixed platoons with known HV models. This article addresses the control of mixed platoons with more general formations and unknown HV models. An innovative data-driven policy learning strategy is proposed to design the controllers for AVs based on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications. The policy learning strategy is embedded with the constraints of control input, inter-vehicular distance error and V2V communication topology. The strategy establishes a safe and robustly stable mixed platoon using prescribed communication topologies. The design efficacy is verified through simulations of a mixed platoon with different communication topologies and leader velocity profiles.