Adaptive event-triggered sliding mode control for platooning of heterogeneous vehicular systems and its L2 input-to-output string stability

Abstract

Platooning of vehicular systems is an effective technique for enhancing transportation efficiency. As the scale of the vehicular platoon systems increases, disturbances on individual vehicles can affect the whole platoon through their connections. Besides, excessive vehicles impose a significant burden on communication devices. Towards this end, this work investigates the distributed platoon control problem of connected vehicular systems subject to disturbances by employing a resource-efficient communication mechanism. The proposed adaptive event-triggered mechanism (AETM) avoids periodic data transmission and reduces communication burden among vehicles. Besides, the AETM regulates the triggered threshold dynamically via the perception of spacing errors and avoids continuous inter-vehicle communication. Next, an AETM-based finite-time extended state observer (AFESO) is designed to alleviate the impact of the external disturbances. Then, an adaptive event-triggered distributed sliding mode control (DSMC) framework is developed to guarantee platoon stability. It is approved that, under the proposed control method, the closed-loop system subject to the disturbances satisfies the $L_2$ input-to-output string stability ($L_2$-IOSS). The salient feature of the AETM-based DSMC is that the AETM can effectively reduce communication consumption, while DSMC mitigates the performance degradation caused by triggering errors and disturbances. Finally, numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.