Hierarchical Safe Control of Heterogeneous Connected Vehicle Systems Using Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Control

Unexpected faults occurring in a connected vehicle (CV) are inevitable, imposing potential safety risks upon a vehicle platoon, and it is more challenging to tackle in the case of heterogeneous CVs. In this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical control framework that integrates an upper observer layer and a lower tracking layer. Based on distributed fixed-time observers in the upper layer, the following vehicles can observe the leader's state through vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. Adaptive fault-tolerant control techniques are leveraged to address the issues of unknown actuator faults and help CVs track their observed leader's state in the lower tracking layer. Furthermore, we formulate two sufficient conditions to ensure the stability of closed-loop systems and the feasibility of the proposed control framework. To validate our method, three numerical examples and comparative results are provided to show the effectiveness and competitiveness of the presented techniques.