Fixed-Time H_∞ Consensus Control of Uncertain Vehicular Platooning Systems With Homogeneous Time-Varying Actuator Delay

This article develops a fixed-time <tex-math notation="LaTeX">H_∞</tex-math> consensus control protocol for heterogeneous uncertain vehicular platooning to mitigate the adverse effects of disturbance, transmission delay when exchanging information between agents, and input delay from vehicles' controllers to their actuators. To deal with this problem, a control scheme with a fixed-time observer is proposed by considering the inter-vehicle spacing policy. A fixed-time unknown observer is embedded to reconstruct the composite unknown terms in a fixed-time. Based on the Lyapunov concept, a distributed sliding mode control law, which is independent of the type of topologies, is introduced to ensure the fulfillment of platoon control objectives in a fixed-time interval regardless of the initial states. Simulations verify the main results.