  The paper tailors the so-called wave-based control popular in the field of
flexible mechanical structures to the field of distributed control of vehicular
platoons. The proposed solution augments the symmetric bidirectional control
algorithm with a wave-absorbing controller implemented on the leader, and/or on
the rear-end vehicle. The wave-absorbing controller actively absorbs an
incoming wave of positional changes in the platoon and thus prevents
oscillations of inter-vehicle distances. The proposed controller significantly
improves the performance of platoon manoeuvrers such as
acceleration/deceleration or changing the distances between vehicles without
making the platoon string unstable. Numerical simulations show that the
wave-absorbing controller performs efficiently even for platoons with a large
number of vehicles, for which other platooning algorithms are inefficient or
require wireless communication between vehicles.
