Prescribed Performance Sliding Mode Control of Vehicular Platoons With Input Delays

This paper investigates a problem of platooning control satisfying prescribed transient and steady-state performances for connected vehicles subject to input delays. An integral compensation of input delays is introduced in the position tracking system, resulting in an improved constant time headway (CTH) spacing policy to offer the more realistic spacing between vehicles. The prescribed control performance is achieved by making use of the mapping transformation of spacing errors, and the assumption of initial error condition is relaxed via an additive modification of auxiliary variable. Then a platooning controller capable of guaranteeing both individual vehicle stability and string stability of vehicular platoons is derived in the context of coupling sliding mode control theory. Simulation studies are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method, and also the superiority to the existing methods.