Collision-Free Ecological Cooperative Robust Control for Uncertain Vehicular Platoons With Communication Delay

The varying real-world road conditions (eg. slopes, speed limits) have great effects on the vehicle dynamics and fuel characteristics. The lack of consideration for these effects may lead to deteriorative fuel economy and even collisions. This paper presents a hierarchical control framework for a connected and automated vehicular platoon subject to time-vary uncertain dynamics and uniform communication delays. This control method minimizes the fuel consumptions and ensures the tracking performance on the premise of collision-free property. Firstly, a centralized ecological speed planning (CESP) algorithm based on dynamic programing (DP) is designed as the upper layer. This layer produces the fuel-optimal and feasible speed profiles, which can be followed by all vehicles, for the entire platoon based on the preview information of road conditions (eg. slopes, speed limits). Secondly, the distributed collision-free speed tracking control (DCST) method is proposed in the lower real-time control layer. The collision-free property is guaranteed by the uniform boundedness performance of the well-designed potential function of the spacing error. The convergences of all speed tracking errors are proved through barbalat's lemma. By modifying the desired spacing model, the application range of DCST is extended to the conditions with large initial deviations. Finally, the main theoretical results are verified through numerical simulations.