Aiming at the difficulties such as poor formation stability and low passage efficiency of smart platooning (SP) when passing through unsignalized intersections, an intelligent vehicle platooning control method based on Virtual Leaders (VLs) has been proposed. Firstly, taking the SP as the research object, improving the traditional artificial potential function (IAPF),using nonlinear functional relationships to describe the vehicle-vehicle forces within the SP system. Secondly, based on the idea of virtual navigation, an improved artificial potential function flocking control algorithm based on virtual leaders (IAPFFCA-VLs) for SP forming has been designed, and the stability of the algorithm has been proved by Lyapunov stability method and LaSalle invariance principle. Finally, using Matlab to simulate the SP forming control and compared with the flocking control algorithm incorporating IAPF (FCA-IAPF). The simulation results show that the FCA-IAPF can realize vehicle-vehicle distance control and collision avoidance, but with the increase of the number of intelligent vehicles, there is the problem of local optimal ‘chunking’ and can not form a regular SP. Compared to FCA-IAPF, the overall performance of the IAPFFCA-VLs algorithm are optimized, which can realize different initial states, different numbers of vehicles with the same destination to maintain reasonable spacing, avoiding collision while speed gradual to reach consistency, the positional distance deviation end-value between all intelligent vehicles and their respective VL is less than 0.1m, the longitudinal velocity deviation end-value is less than 1m/s, and the transverse velocity deviation end-value tends to be 0.001m/s, safe, rapid and stable constrained as a regular SP and drive out of the unsignalized intersection, which is important to improve the unsignalized intersection SP driving stability as well as traffic efficiency.