CarTracking

This model shows a following car tracking a leading car in an unreliable communication environment.

This model shows a following car tracking a leading car in an unreliable communication environment. In normal operation, the leading car informs the following car about its position, speed, acceleration, and a time stamp for this information. The following car does a sanity check to make sure that the data are coherent. If so, the following car will apply the same acceleration, and thus (in this simple model) tracks the leading car perfectly.
A user can determine when the communication channel fault will occur and when it well end by setting the faultStartTime and faultStopTime parameters.
If the following car receives incorrect information, it abandons the received acceleration, and relies on distance measurements for tracking. In this mode, the following car will apply zero acceleration, if it is too close to the leading car, and maximum acceleration if it is too far from the leading car. This (simple-minded) control law results in a rather jerky ride.

The block diagram for the model was constructed using the Ptolemy II schematic editor called Vergil.

An alternate version of this model is called the V2V (Vehicle 2 Vehicle) model