Autonomous coordinated control of a platoon of vehicles with multiple disturbances

This study studies coordinated control of a platoon of vehicles consisting of a leader and multiple followers when multiple vehicles suffer from disturbances. Small disturbances acting on one vehicle may cause large spacing errors between intervehicles. In addition, the spacing errors propagate up or down in a vehicle platoon. To mitigate the adverse effect of the disturbances, a control law is proposed based on only the position information of the vehicle itself and its preceding vehicle. To analyse the disturbances propagation among the platoon, the upper bounds of two transfer functions are presented including the transfer function matrix 𝒢 de from external disturbances to spacing errors as well as the transfer function matrix 𝒢 ue from a leader's input control to spacing errors. Furthermore, an alternative control law is proposed when the velocity of the leader is known by the followers. In this case, two tighter upper bounds of 𝒢 l de and 𝒢 l ue are presented. The derived upper bounds of the transfer functions are independent of the number of vehicles in the platoon. Simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.