An exponential type control design for autonomous vehicle platoon systems

Abstract Grouping vehicles into platoon is an effective method of increasing the road capacity of vehicles. Thereby there are autonomous vehicle platoon systems. In this paper, a platoon system consisting of a leading vehicle and N following vehicles is considered. The dynamic model containing the uncertainty is established subject to the physical laws. The uncertainty is time‐varying and bounded with unknown bound. Our objective is to design a control to guarantee uniform ultimate boundedness and collision avoidance. This is then formulated as a one‐sided constraint‐following control problem. Employing swarm properties, Udwadia‐Kalaba theory and a state transformation, an exponential type adaptive robust control approach for each following vehicle is brought forward. The proposed control renders the platoon system uniform boundedness and uniform ultimate boundedness in the presence of the uncertainty. The performances of compact formation and collision avoidance are also achieved.