Robust control of heterogeneous vehicular platoon with uncertain dynamics and communication delay

Abstract

Platoon formation of highway vehicles has the potential to significantly enhance road safety, improve highway utility, and increase traffic efficiency. However, various uncertainties and disturbances that are present in real-world driving conditions make the implementation of vehicular platoon a challenging problem. This study presents an H-infinity control method for a platoon of heterogeneous vehicles with uncertain vehicle dynamics and uniform communication delay. The requirements of string stability, robustness and tracking performance are systematically measured by the Hinfinity norm, and explicitly satisfied by casting into the linear fractional transformation format. A delay-dependent linear matrix inequality is derived to numerically solve the distributed controllers for each vehicle. The performances of the controlled platoon are theoretically analysed by using a delay-dependent Lyapunov function which includes a linear quadratic function of states during the delay period. Simulations with a platoon of heterogeneous vehicles are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method under random parameters and external disturbances.

Event-Triggered Control for String-Stable Vehicle Platooning

“…To be more concrete, the communication is packet-based, where the rate at which these data-packages can be transmitted is limited and the communication channel is subject to communication delays. As shown in [10], [15], [16], [25], [29], [36], [37], [40], and [42], these communication imperfections can have a significant influence on the performance of CACC systems in the sense that if the communication delays are too large and/or the rate at which transmissions occur is too small, string stability and other performance properties for a given time gap might no longer be guaranteed. Hence, the number of transmissions in time should be sufficiently large and communication delays sufficiently small in order to obtain the desired platooning behavior.…”

“…These imperfections include the presence of (time-varying) delays and a limited communication bandwidth. As already mentioned in the introduction, the aforementioned artifacts potentially degrade the performance of CACC systems in the sense that if the communication delays are too large and/or the time in between two consecutive transmission is too large, string stability for a given time-gap might no longer be guaranteed, see also [16], [25], [29], [36], [37], [42]. A second issue that arises when using wireless communication is that excessive use of the communication resources might lead to degradation of the reliability of the DSRC channel in terms of packet losses and transmission delays as reported in [5].…”

A Robust Longitudinal Control Strategy of Platoons under Model Uncertainties and Time Delays

“…This controller has robustness to parametric uncertainties of the ET model. An -infinity control method for a CAV platoon is proposed considering the uncertain vehicle dynamics without considering the feedback delay [23]. The robust control is designed considering the differences of dynamics for CAVs in the platoon.…”

Decoupled H ∞ control of automated vehicular platoons with complex interaction topologies

“…This research has been extended to cover unidirectional topology by Zheng et al [20]. Gao et al [21] designed a local string stable H ∞ controller for a heterogeneous platoon, simultaneously considering vehicle model uncertainties and communication delays.…”