Distributed Adaptive Sliding Mode Control of Vehicular Platoon With Uncertain Interaction Topology

In a platoon control system, a fixed and symmetrical topology is quite rare because of adverse communication environments and continuously moving vehicles. This paper presents a distributed adaptive sliding mode control scheme for more realistic vehicular platooning. In this scheme, adaptive mechanism is adopted to handle platoon parametric uncertainties, while a structural decomposition method deals with the coupling of interaction topology. A numerical algorithm based on linear matrix inequality is developed to place the poles of the sliding motion dynamics in the required area to balance quickness and smoothness. The proposed scheme allows the nodes to interact with each other via different types of topologies, e.g., either asymmetrical or symmetrical, either fixed or switching. Different from existing techniques, it does not require the exact values of each entity in the topological matrix, and only needs to know the bounds of its eigenvalues. The effectiveness of this proposed methodology is validated by bench tests under several conditions.