Abstract:

A distributed H∞ control method for automated vehicular platoon interacted by uncertain network topologies was presented to improve the road efficiency and to alleviate the pressure of traffic. Based on the vehicle longitudinal dynamics compensated for by an inverse model, the vehicle node model and its parameter
range were obtained by process identification. A decoupling method was proposed based on the platoon uncertain model set up to decompose the platoon system through linear transformation and eigenvalue decomposition of topological matrix. A numerical method was given to design and optimized the distributed H∞ controller with linear matrix inequality (LMI) approach, and its robust stability and tracking performance was validated by bench tests. The results show that the distance error and the speed error are less than 1 m and 0.3 m/s respectively with the model errors and environmental disturbances used in tests. The proposed distributed H∞ control strategy can attenuate the disturbances arising from model errors and environmental resistances, and accordingly a fine robust performance of platoon is ensured. 

Key words: vehicular platoon/ distributed control/ system decoupling/ , robust performance