California Partners for Advanced Transportation Technology

This report is concerned with the modeling and control issues regarding braking in an Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) setting. Specifically, it addresses the issue of vehicle control in an automated highway system, brake actuation and coordinated brake and throttle switching. It first presents a hydraulic model of the brake system. A method for designing stable controllers for uncertain, mismatched nonlinear system is then described. A method to estimate the coefficient between the brake pressure at the wheel and the brake torque is presented. The next section describes a controller structure which can modulate the engine and the brake torque to perform the four basic longitudinal control actions of speed control, spacing control, platoon joining and platoon splitting.