Extremum Seeking Control-based Control Framework for Electric Vehicle Platooning

Abstract

Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are more commonly deployed in short-distance and in-city operations than in long-distance on-highway operations mainly due to range anxiety. One of the solutions to alleviate the range anxiety is platooning. Vehicle platooning with short distances has demonstrated significant improvements in vehicle efficiency by reducing the aerodynamic drag force. To maximize the energy saving benefit brought by vehicle platooning, it is critical to identify the inter-vehicle space that results in the most reduction of aerodynamic drag coefficient in real time and appropriately maintain the inter-vehicle distance, which is a rather challenging task due to the unknown correlation between the inter-vehicle space and aerodynamic drag coefficient. This paper proposes a unified extremum seeking control (ESC)-based control framework to find and maintain the inter-vehicle distance that corresponds to the minimum air drag coefficient in presence of the environment uncertainty. The controller is implemented on a BEV model with a one-pedal driving (OPD) feature and validated in simulation. Simulation results demonstrated that the proposed ESC-based control framework can effectively identify the inter-vehicle distance with respect to the minimum aerodynamic drag coefficient in real time and regulate the inter-vehicle distance at the desired value without steady-state oscillations. The proposed framework can potentially be applied to both passenger BEVs and commercial BEVs to improve vehicle efficiency.