Distributed Output-Feedback Control of Unmanned Container Transporter Platooning With Uncertainties and Disturbances Using Event-Triggered Mechanism.

This paper presents a distributed output-feedback-based coordinated controller for Unmanned Container Transporter (UCT) platooning. To reduce the communication burden and the execution rate of actuator, event-triggered mechanisms (ETMs) are introduced to the position-heading information transmission and controller-to-actuator channel respectively. An event-triggered extended state observer (ET-ESO) with inter-sample output predictor is proposed to recover the position-heading and velocity information as well as to estimate model uncertainties and unknown disturbances. Kinematic and kinetic control laws are constructed to achieve formation control of the UCT platoon. The Input-to-State Stability (ISS) of the closed-loop system is analyzed via cascade theory. Furthermore, it is proved that the Zeno behavior is excluded from the proposed ETMs by the analysis on minimum inter-event time. Simulation results substantiate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed controller for UCT platooning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]