Scalable and Resilient Platooning Control of Cooperative Automated Vehicles

This paper addresses the problem of distributed cooperative longitudinal control of automated vehicle platoons subject to a variety of uncertainties, including unknown engine time lags, external disturbances, measurement noises, and actuator anomaly in follower vehicles as well as unknown leader control. First, a unified framework is proposed for accomplishing resilient vehicle platooning, which empowers longitudinal vehicle state estimation, anomaly signal estimation and compensation, and adaptive platoon controller design to be addressed in a comprehensive way. Second, a novel scalable platooning control design approach is developed to guarantee desired platoon stability and resilience over generic communication topologies and various spacing policies. A salient feature of the approach is that the design procedure does not depend on any global information of the associated topology, and thus preserves essential scalability for large and/or size-varying platoons. Third, it is shown that the proposed longitudinal platooning control approach is promising for performing flexible cooperative maneuvers such as platoon splitting and merging that are beyond the capacity of most existing longitudinal platooning strategies. Finally, simulation results for different platoon maneuvers are elaborated to substantiate the efficacy of the proposed approach.