Simultaneous Longitudinal and Lateral Control of Vehicle Platoon Subject to Stochastic Communication Delays

Abstract

In addition to the longitudinal dynamics, the lateral control of the platoon can significantly affect its performance on winding road. This paper presents a platoon control framework on winding road for electric vehicles subject to stochastic communication delay and interference. The intervehicle spacing errors (ISEs) in both longitudinal and lateral directions are transformed to an arc-length-based form first. Then, the relationship between single vehicle dynamics and the ISEs is created based on the feedback linearization of the nonlinear system and the arc-length parametric representation of the directed curve. In this way, the whole platoon can be represented by three decoupled linear single-input and single-output systems, i.e., the longitudinal, lateral, and yaw. To assure the steady-state stability of the platoon on a winding road, a robust controller based on the H∞ method is designed to suppress the affection of the communication delay and interference. Also, sufficient conditions that achieve the transient stability of the platoon are derived. Simulations are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed method. Results show that the proposed platoon control can realize the stability of the platoon as well as the supernal road traceability.