7. Longitudinal Control for Vehicle Platoons

Automated highway systems are the subject of intense research and development by several research groups, most notably by the California PATH program at the University of California, Berkeley. In an automated highway system (AHS), the objective is to dramatically improve the traffic flow capacity on a highway by enabling vehicles to travel together in tightly spaced platoons. The system requires that only adequately instrumented fully automated vehicles be allowed on this special highway. Manually driven vehicles cannot be allowed to operate on such a highway. Figure 5-2 in chapter 5 shows a photograph of eight fully automated cars traveling together in a tightly spaced platoon during a demonstration conducted by California PATH in August 1997. More details on this experimental demonstration are described in section 7.9 of this chapter.