Distributed sliding mode control for formation of multiple nonlinear AVs coupled by uncertain topology

To combat the variety uncertainties in topologies, dynamical models and disturbances, this paper presents a distributed sliding mode control strategy for formation control of multiple AVs. In this scheme, all collected information of each AV is used for its control and different perturbations are dealt with separately to reduce the contractions among them. Furthermore, a distributed adaptive algorithm is designed to replace the witching part for smoothness of control. The convergence of sliding surfaces of both two controllers is analysed theoretically. The sliding dynamics is affected by both the feedback and interaction topology. The existing decoupling method to handle the variety topologies can be used to synthesize the sliding dynamics. Finally, this approach has been applied to vehicular platooning and validated by several comparative simulations. The results show that the proposed method can control multiple AVs better than the state feedback strategy.