Sliding Mode Platooning Control of Automated Vehicles Under Round‐Robin Protocols

Platoon control is a typical cooperative control scheme to alleviate various social issues caused by the rapid increase in the number of vehicles. In the intelligent transportation systems, the communication protocols and spacing policies significantly affect platoon performance as well as traffic efficiency. This paper focuses on platoon control of vehicle systems with modified constant‐time headway spacing policies (MCTHPs) in the framework of sliding mode control (SMC), where round‐robin (RR) protocols are proposed to alleviate the communication burden. First, an integral sliding mode surface related to the employed scheduling protocol is designed by resorting to MCTHPs. A dynamical model of platoon tracking errors is then acquired via an equivalent SMC law, reflecting the effect of both MCTHPs and RR protocols. Moreover, the reachability of the proposed sliding mode surface and the required platoon performance are profoundly discussed and sufficient conditions to determine the required gain parameters are deduced with essential inequality techniques. Finally, the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method are demonstrated through numerical simulations.