H∞ Consensus of Homogeneous Vehicular Platooning Systems With Packet Dropout and Communication Delay

Consensus of vehicular platooning systems under external disturbances and network imperfections, i.e., communication delay and random packet dropout, is considered in this article. Third-order dynamics are considered for vehicles to take into account the rate of change of acceleration, i.e., the jerk, for which its control can provide comfort to the passengers. Designing consensus protocols for platoon of vehicles with third-order dynamics that can deal with both disturbance and network imperfection is not straightforward and requires new developments. Using the Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional, sufficient conditions are provided to assure that: 1) the consensus error dynamics are asymptotically mean-square consensus stable and 2) a given disturbance attenuation level is achieved in the presence of both network imperfections and disturbances. Simulation results validate the efficiency of the presented approach in dealing with disturbances and network imperfections.