Event-Based Vehicle Coordination Using Nonlinear Unidirectional Controllers

This paper presents a framework to control vehicle platoons with event-based communication and nonlinear controllers. The overall goal is to achieve a platoon that moves in a desired formation with a desired velocity and the convergence to this formation should be exponential while Zeno behavior has to be excluded. The set of admissible controllers for this problem is specified by the properties that they need to guarantee. These properties will be of a form such that they can be checked locally by every vehicle itself and heterogeneous controllers as well as heterogeneous possibly nonlinear dynamics of the vehicles in the platoon are allowed. The framework is shown to work with several communication networks and the set of networks will be characterized. Modifications that are necessary to cope with additive disturbances are described and a simulation example that shows the benefits of being able to use the framework in different networks is given.