Adaptive Sliding Mode Control of Vehicular Platoons With Prescribed Tracking Performance

This paper investigates a vehicular platoon control problem with prescribed tracking performance in the presence of actuator saturation, uncertain parameters, and unknown disturbances. Two adaptive sliding mode control schemes based on leader-predecessor and leader-bidirectional information flows are presented to ensure string stability and strong string stability, respectively, with a prescribed tracking performance. The actuator saturation nonlinearity is addressed by approximating it with a smooth hyperbolic tangent function. The effects of uncertain parameters and exogenous disturbances are dealt with by introducing a set of adaptation laws. The effectiveness of the proposed control schemes is demonstrated via numerical simulation results.