Robust control of large vehicular platoons with prescribed transient and steady state performance

In this paper, we consider the longitudinal control problem for a platoon of vehicles with unknown nonlinear dynamics. More specifically, we design a decentralized model-free control protocol in the sense that each vehicle utilizes only local relative information regarding its front vehicle, obtained by its on-board sensors, to calculate its own control signal, without incorporating any prior knowledge of the model nonlinearities/disturbances or any approximation structures to acquire such knowledge. Additionally, the transient and steady state response is a priori determined by certain designer-specified performance functions and is fully decoupled by the agents' dynamic model, the number of vehicles composing the platoon and the control gains selection, which relaxes significantly the control design procedure. Moreover, introducing certain inter-vehicular distance constraints during the transient response shaping, collisions between successive vehicles as well as connectivity breaks owing to limited sensing capabilities are provably avoided. Finally, the proposed methodology results in a low complexity design. Actually, it is a static scheme involving very few and simple calculations to output the control signal, thus making its distributed implementation straightforward.