Safety‐guaranteed constraint‐oriented modelling and control for bidirectional vehicular platoons

Abstract

The safety of a vehicular platoon is seriously threatened in the presence of actuator saturations, (possibly fast) time-varying non-linear uncertainties. Meanwhile, the string stability and the strong string stability cannot eliminate the potential safety hazard caused by large initial error conditions. This study focuses on safety-guaranteed distributed control of the vehicular platoon with a bidirectional communication topology and the constant time headway policy. The authors formulate bilateral inequality constraints on the spacing error between adjacent vehicles to represent the collision-avoidance and compact formation performance. A novel state transformation technique is proposed to convert the bounded spacing error space to an unconstrained state space. On the basis, Comprehensive equality constraints for the transformed states are established by integrating the information of proximal (preceding and following) vehicles. In addition, an anti-windup compensation method is utilised to handle actuator saturations. Then an adaptive constraint-following controller is designed to render the uniform boundedness and uniform ultimate boundedness performance of the transformed state. As a result, the string stability, the strong string stability, the collision-avoidance and compact formation are guaranteed despite the presence of actuator saturations and complex uncertainties. Numerical simulations are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.