A Joint Network/Control Design for Cooperative Automatic Driving: Extended Version

Cooperative automatic driving, or platooning, is a promising solution to improve traffic safety, while reducing congestion and pollution. The design of a control system for this application is a challenging, multi-disciplinary problem, as cooperation between vehicles is obtained through wireless communication. So far, control and network issues of platooning have been investigated separately. In this work we design a cooperative driving system from a joint network and control perspective, determining worst-case upper bounds on the safety distance subject to network losses, so the actual inter-vehicle gap can be tuned depending on vehicle or network performance. By means of simulation, we show that the system is very robust to packet losses and that the derived bounds are never violated.