*e current platoon control strategies of connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) focus on controlling the fixed intervehicle distance, i.e., the string stability of the platoon system. Here, we aimed to design a CAV platoon control strategy based on a constraint-following approach to solve the problem of platoon starting. As the resistance of the vehicle during driving varies with time, this study regarded the CAV platoon system as a changing dynamic system and introduced the Udwadia–Kalaba (U–K) approach to simplify the solution. Apart from adding an equality constraint, unlike most other studies, this study imposed a bilateral inequality constraint on the intervehicle distance between successive CAVs to prevent collisions. Meanwhile, a diffeomorphism method was introduced to transform the bounded state into an unbounded state. *e proposed control strategy could render each CAV compliant with both the original imposed bilateral inequality constraint and the equality constraint. *e former avoids collisions, and the latter indicates the string stability of the designed CAV platoon system. *e effectiveness of the proposed controller was verified by numerical experiments. *e gap errors tend to converge to zero, which is not amplified by the propagation of traffic flow.
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