A nonlinear disturbance observer based super twisting control for cooperative adaptive cruise control system affected by communication imperfections

Abstract

A cooperative adaptive cruise control system utilizes vehicle-to-vehicle communication in addition to onboard sensors. Vehicle-to-vehicle communication is established by a short-range wireless network, which is susceptible to communication delay or loss of communication frequently. It would result in higher inter-vehicle distance to maintain the string stability of a platoon. In this paper, a nonlinear observer-based super twisting control is proposed to retain the property of string stability in various practical scenarios of communication delay, complete loss of communication, and parametric uncertainty. It ensures asymptotic convergence of the spacing error. The stability of an individual vehicle and the string stability of a platoon is derived. The performance of the proposed scheme is compared with two well-known methods for controlling a platoon of cooperative adaptive cruise control and adaptive cruise control vehicles.