Robust tracking strategy for nonlinear connected vehicle cyber-physical systems

This paper investigates the problem of tracking target control of a nonlinear system in the context of cyber-physical systems for connected autonomous vehicles with external unknown disturbances. A new robust tracking strategy via backstepping sliding-mode control is proposed. First, a connected nonlinear vehicle dynamical model with disturbances is constructed. Then, a disturbance observer is presented to approximate the unknown disturbances when the derivative of the disturbance is bounded. This paper has proved that the error of the observation can converge to zero in finite time. Third, a tracking control method is designed which combines the backstepping method with the sliding-mode method. According to the method, the estimated values of interference are used as a priori knowledge. Furthermore, the stability of the designed control strategy is demonstrated through using the Lyapunov theory. Finally, simulation experiments are presented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approaches.