The paper deals with the design of nonlinear adaptive cruise controllers for vehicular platoons operating on an open road or a ring-road. The constructed feedback controllers are nonlinear functions of the distance between successive vehicles and their speeds. It is shown that the proposed novel controllers guarantee safety (collision avoidance) and bounded vehicle speeds by explicitly characterizing the set of allowable inputs. Moreover, we guarantee global asymptotic stability of the platoon to a desired configuration as well as string stability. Certain macroscopic properties are also investigated. The efficiency of the nonlinear adaptive cruise controllers is demonstrated by means of a numerical example.

中文翻译：

---

车辆排的非线性自适应巡航控制

该论文涉及在开阔道路或环路上运行的车辆排的非线性自适应巡航控制器的设计。构建的反馈控制器是连续车辆之间的距离及其速度的非线性函数。结果表明，所提出的新型控制器通过明确表征允许输入的集合来保证安全（避免碰撞）和有界车速。此外，我们保证排的全局渐近稳定性到所需的配置以及字符串稳定性。还研究了某些宏观特性。通过数值例子证明了非线性自适应巡航控制器的效率。