Stable Longitudinal Control of Heterogeneous Vehicular Platoon With Disturbances and Information Delays

This paper presents a robust control method for heterogeneous vehicle platoon subject to varying road slopes, aerodynamic drag, and wireless communication delay. First, a heterogeneous vehicle platoon is built, including parameter uncertainty, equivalent communication delay, network-induced delay caused by discrete data in sensor and wireless communication, and external disturbance (i.e., road slope and wind). Second, a Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional-based <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$H_\infty $ </tex-math></inline-formula> controller is designed to generate the state-feedback control which could ensure inner-vehicle stability and string stability of platoon simultaneously. Third, <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mathcal {L}_{2} $ </tex-math></inline-formula> string stability is proposed to ensure the platoon stability that guarantees the perturbations that do not grow unbounded as they propagate through the platoon. Simulation results indicate the proposed robust controller achieves tracking of desired inter-vehicle spacing and string stable of platoon while comparing with the regular string stability controller.