System-Theoretic Framework for Intent Sharing in Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control

The vast majority of protocols for connected automated vehicles are based on status sharing, i.e., communication of the current vehicle state among neighboring vehicles. Only recently the idea of intent sharing has been put forward, where not only the current state, but also the vehicle intention in the near future can be communicated. In the context of Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC), this work provides a system-theoretic framework for intent sharing through the lens of output regulation. We present analytical results showing two fundamental aspects of CACC with intent sharing: a) when vehicle-to-vehicle communication is reliable, intent sharing provides no benefits over status sharing, as both sharing paradigms result in the same protocol; b) intent sharing becomes beneficial when vehicle-to-vehicle communication is unreliable, in which case the latest communicated intent can be used to reconstruct the missing information of the neighboring vehicle in the near future. Together with theoretical analysis, numerical validations with synthetic and real-world data are provided, where the benefits of CACC with the proposed implementation of intent sharing are shown against several state-of-the-art CACC protocols.