Robust Control of Heterogeneous Vehicular Platoon with Non-Ideal Communication

Abstract

The application of wireless communication to platooning brings such challenges as information delay and varieties of interaction topologies. To compensate for the information delay, a state predictor based control strategy is proposed, which transmits the future information of nodes instead of current values. Based on the closed loop dynamics of platoon with state predictor and feedback controller, a decoupling strategy is presented to analysis and design the platoon control system with lower order by adopting the eigenvalue decomposition of topological matrix. A numerical method based on LMI (Linear Matrix Inequality) is provided to find the required robust performance controller. Moreover, the influence of information delay on performance is studied theoretically and it is found that the tolerable maximum delay is determined by the maximum topological eigenvalue. The effectiveness of the proposed strategy is validated by several comparative simulations under various conditions with other methods.