Adaptive platoon control for nonlinear vehicular systems with asymmetric input deadzone and inter-vehicular spacing constraints

Abstract

This paper investigates the adaptive platoon control for nonlinear vehicular systems with asymmetric nonlinear input deadzone and inter-vehicular spacing constraints. Vehicular platoon control encounters great challenges from unmodeled dynamic uncertainties, unknown external disturbances, unknown asymmetric nonlinear input deadzone and inter-vehicular spacing constraints. In order to avoid collisions between consecutive vehicles as well as the connectivity breaks owing to limited sensing capabilities, a symmetric barrier Lyapunov function is employed. Then, a neural-network-based terminal sliding mode control (TSMC) scheme with minimal learning parameters is developed to maintain inter-vehicles keep connectivity and simultaneously avoid collisions. The uniform ultimate boundedness of all signals in the whole vehicular platoon control system is proven via Lyapunov analysis. Finally, a numerical example is proposed to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.