Distributed Adaptive Event-Triggered Control and Stability Analysis for Vehicular Platoon

This paper is concerned with the stability of the vehicular platoon consisting of a leader and multiple cooperative autonomous driving followers. The objective of the platoon control is to ensure all vehicles traveling at the same speed while maintaining a safety spacing. To achieve the objective, a novel control framework consisting of the distributed adaptive event-triggered observer and the car-following control protocol is proposed for the vehicular platoon control. The condition that only few following vehicles can access the information of the leader is considered. In order to design controllers while avoid using any global information, such as the system matrix and the state of the leader, a distributed event-triggered observer is proposed, such that each vehicle can observe the dynamics of the leader. Based on this observer, both collision avoidance and limited communication source of each vehicle are simultaneously considered in the design of the observer. It is shown that under the proposed control framework, the platoon can achieve asymptotical stable, meanwhile, the amount of transmission data and communication cost among vehicles can be reduced. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to show the applicability of the obtained results.