Robust Coordinated Control of Nonlinear Heterogeneous Platoon Interacted by Uncertain Topology

To simultaneously deal with the uncertain interaction topology, parametric errors and external disturbances, this paper proposes a new coordinated control scheme for the platoon composed of nonlinear and heterogeneous automated vehicles (AVs). In this scheme, different perturbations are dealt with separately to reduce the contraction among them by using the sliding mode control theory. Considering the individual dynamics, a distributed coordinated controller including both lateral and longitudinal motions is designed for each AV with online estimation of the unknown parameters and disturbances. On the sliding surfaces of longitudinal motion, a decoupling approach using the eigenvalue decomposition of topological matrix and linear transformation is proposed to deal with the topological uncertainty. Then the dynamical system of platoon coupled by the information flow is decomposed into the subsystems with lower order. The relationship of the robust performance between the original and decoupled system is analyzed theoretically. Based on this theoretical conclusion, a numerical way is given based on linear matrix inequality (LMI) theory to design the parameters of sliding motion dynamics. By this way, the exact topological matrix is not necessary and only the bound of its eigenvalue is required. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is validated by several comparative simulations under variety conditions.

Automated summary

This paper proposes a coordinated control scheme for a platoon of nonlinear and heterogeneous automated vehicles (AVs) to deal with uncertain interaction topology, parametric errors, and external disturbances simultaneously. The scheme uses sliding mode control theory to separate different perturbations and designs a distributed coordinated controller for each AV considering their individual dynamics.