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This paper presents a stochastic stable control protocol for heterogeneous vehicle platoon subject to communication topologies change, external disturbance, and information delay. First, a random vehicle platoon system composed entirely of several pure electric vehicles is built. The random variation of data transmission link among the platoon in a natural traffic environment is considered and molded by the Markov chain combined with the directed graph method. The influence of delays and discrete data in wireless communication, road slope, and air resistance on the vehicle platoon is also considered by introducing the external interferences and equivalent information delays. Additionally, to ensure the vehicle platoon’s inner-vehicle stability, the variable-gain distributed controller is proposed based on the Markovian jumping system stability theory and $ H_\infty$ control. Finally, the $ \mathcal {L}_{2}$ stochastic string stability is defined to attenuate perturbations as they propagate through the platoon. Simulation studies about a vehicle platoon under four communication topologies random switching with two different control methods are provided to verify the theoretical result. It is shown that, compared to traditional platoon robust control, it is possible to achieve the vehicle platoon’s stability even if in the continuous mutation of unstable topologies by using the proposed control approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reconstitution of control architecture creates a great challenge for distributed drive electric vehicles (DDEV), due to the emergence of a new distributed driving strategy. To this end, a novel distributed control architecture is proposed in this paper for integrated control of active front steering (AFS) system and direct yaw moment (DYC) system. First, a multi-agent system (MAS) is employed to construct a general framework, where AFS and DYC act as agents that work together to improve vehicle lateral stability and simultaneously reduce workloads of drivers during path tracking. The cooperative control strategies of two agents are obtained through Pareto-optimality theory to ensure optimal control performance of AFS and DYC. Then, on the basis of dynamic interaction between agents, terminal constraints, including terminal cost function and terminal input with local static feedback, are designed to guarantee the asymptotic stability of the close-loop system. Finally, virtual simulations are conducted to evaluate the proposed controller. The results indicate that the proposed control architecture can effectively preserve vehicle stability and reduce workloads of drivers, especially for the inexperienced driver. Furthermore, the hardware-in-loop (HIL) test results also demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed controller. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an integrated platoon control framework for heterogeneous vehicles on curved roads with varying slopes, aerodynamic drag, and wireless communication delays. First, a linear heterogeneous vehicle platoon model with decoupled longitudinal and lateral dynamics is built based on nonlinear feedback linearization and arc-length parametric transformation of an arbitrary curved road. The external disturbances are also considered, including the up-down road slopes, wind and equivalent time-delays caused by the wireless communication delay and discrete data in onboard sensors. Second, to achieve stable platoon control on a curved road, the platoon uses the state-feedback control method in the longitudinal direction while each vehicle tracks the centerline of the curved road to realize lateral control. Longitudinally, an $ H_\infty$ platoon controller is designed based on the Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional to ensure the inner-vehicle and string stability of the platoon, which suffers from parameter uncertainty, and external disturbances. Additionally, the $ \mathcal {L}_2$ string stability is defined to guarantee that the perturbations do not grow unbounded as they propagate through the platoon. Simulation results indicate that the proposed robust controller achieves proper platoon intervehicle spacing in both the longitudinal and lateral directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]