Cooperative Startup Control for Heterogeneous Vehicle Platoons: A Finite-Time Output Tracking-Based Approach

The connected vehicle (CV) technology has emerged in recent years. This article studies cooperative startup control of heterogeneous CVs in a platoon. First, from the perspective of cooperative tracking of heterogeneous multiagent systems, a hierarchical finite-time control framework is established, which consists of an upper-level interactive observer layer and a lower-level local controller layer. By separating neighboring information interaction from local dynamics control, the proposed framework allows to design upper-level observers and lower-level local controllers separately. Second, by introducing a potential function related to the consensus and observing errors, a distributed finite-time observer is designed for each CV to observe a startup reference trajectory available for only part of the CVs. Third, a distributed local finite-time controller is designed for each CV to track its observed startup reference trajectories. Within the proposed framework, finite-time observing and tracking of the startup reference trajectory are strictly proved to guarantee cooperative startup control. Numerical simulations are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods.