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Recent widespread adoption of vehicle automation and introduction of vehicle-to-vehicle connectivity has opened the doors for techniques as Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) and platooning, showing promising results in terms of traffic capacity and safety improvement, while reducing fuel consumption and CO_2 emissions. However, robustness and strict string stability, despite communication delays and string heterogeneity is still an on-going research field. This thesis deals with the design, study and validation of control systems for cooperative automated car-following, with the purpose of extending their benefits and encourage their employment, focusing on robustness and string stability, despite possible V2V communication delays and string heterogeneity. A feedforward/feedback hierarchical control structure is developed, which modularity is fundamental for the proposal of approaches that target different but complementary performance objectives. The architecture not only permits the adoption of a full speed range spacing policy that target multiple criteria, but can also be employed in a state machine-based CACC framework for urban environments with emergency braking and platoon re-joining capabilities in case of pedestrian interaction. Different feedback control design algorithms are presented for the gap-regulation, for which the fractional-order calculus is demonstrated to provide more accurate closed loop frequency responses and satisfy more demanding requirements. Desired performance is ensured in spite of string heterogeneity through the proposal of two feedforward methods : one based on predecessor-only …