BLF-Based Neuroadaptive Fault-Tolerant Control for Nonlinear Vehicular Platoon With Time-Varying Fault Directions and Distance Restrictions

This paper investigates the neuroadaptive fault-tolerant control of nonlinear vehicular platoon with unmodeled dynamics, external disturbances, time-varying actuator fault directions, and distance restrictions. For the cases of known and unknown fault directions, by combining adaptive terminal sliding mode (TSM) control technique with barrier Lyapunov function (BLF), two neuroadaptive fault-tolerant controllers are designed based on symmetric and asymmetric BLF to ensure reliability and safety of vehicular platoon. BLF approaches are adopted to avoid collisions and to maintain communication connections simultaneously. In addition, it is worth mentioning that the unfavorable symmetry assumptions in the symmetric BLF and prescribed performance methods can be removed by adopting asymmetric BLF. In the proposed scheme, we also combine the Nussbaum function to solve the influence of unknown time-varying fault directions effectively. Furthermore, the nonsingular TSM control technique and the minimum parameter approximation method in radial basis function neural network (RBFNN) are adopted to ensure that the spacing error can converge to an arbitrarily small region in finite-time. Through the Lyapunov stability theory, we prove that all signals in the closed-loop system are bounded in finite time. The proposed control schemes are validated by means of simulation examples.