Cooperative adaptive cruise control presents an opportunity to improve road transportation through increase in road capacity and reduction in energy use and accidents. Clever design of control algorithms and communication systems is required to ensure that the vehicle platoon is stable and meets desired safety requirements. In this paper, we propose a centralized model predictive controller for a heterogeneous platoon of vehicles to reach a desired platoon velocity and individual inter-vehicle distances with driver-selected headway time. As a novel concept, we allow for interruption from a human driver in the platoon that temporarily takes control of their vehicle with the assumption that the driver will, at minimum, obey legal velocity limits and the physical performance constraints of their vehicle. The finite horizon cost function of our proposed platoon controller is inspired from the infinite horizon design. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first platoon controller that integrates human-driven vehicles. We illustrate the performance of our proposed design with a numerical study, demonstrating that the safety distance, velocity, and actuation constraints are obeyed. Additionally, in simulation we illustrate a key property of string stability where the impact of a disturbance is reduced through the platoon.

翻译：协同自适应巡航控制可通过提升道路容量、降低能耗和减少事故来改善公路运输。为确保车辆编队稳定且满足安全要求，需要巧妙设计控制算法与通信系统。本文提出一种异构车辆编队的集中式模型预测控制器，以在驾驶员选择车头时距的前提下实现期望编队速度与个体车间距。作为创新概念，我们允许编队中的人类驾驶员暂时接管车辆控制权，并假设驾驶员至少会遵守法定速度限制及车辆物理性能约束。所提编队控制器的有限时域代价函数受无限时域设计启发。据我们所知，这是首个集成人类驾驶车辆的编队控制器。通过数值研究验证了设计方案的有效性，表明安全距离、速度与执行器约束均得到满足。此外，仿真实验展示了车队稳定性这一关键特性——扰动影响通过编队传播而逐步衰减。