Control of a heterogeneous vehicular platoon with uniform communication delay

Abstract

Platoon driving is critical to improve safety, efficiency, and fuel economy. This paper presents a control method for heterogeneous vehicular platoons with uncertain dynamics and uniform communication delay. The requirements of string stability, robustness and tracking performance are measured by H-infinity norm and satisfied by casting into a linear fractional transformation (LFT) format. A delay-dependent linear matrix inequality (LMI) is derived to numerically solve the decentralized controllers. Many communication topologies can be covered by properly formulating the structure of LMI. The robust stability and performance of the platoon is analyzed theoretically by using a delay-dependent Lyapunov function including a linear quadratic function of states during the delay period. Simulations using a nonlinear vehicle model were conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the H-infinity controllers under the conditions of different vehicle mass, time constant and communication delay.