Consensus of autonomous vehicle platoon with time delays

In this paper consensus control of autonomous vehicle platoon is investigated for connected vehicle systems (CVSs) with time delays. Information interaction of the CVSs can be modeled as a network topology. The network topology is extended into the generic framework adapting to any topology, which is represented by a Laplacian matrix. Based on the generic framework, the distributed control protocols are proposed for the second-order CVSs with time delays. The necessary and sufficient conditions are derived to ensure stability of CVSs, in which it is found that the stability conditions are determined by both real parts and imaginary parts of eigenvalues of Laplacian matrix of the corresponding network topology. Together with the results, further considering time delays, the critical time-delay upper boundaries are achieved, and the necessary and sufficient conditions are also provided for convergence analysis of CVSs with time delays, which play a key role to tune the controller parameters with considering the threshold of the eigenvalues. Simulations are given to verify effectiveness of the theoretical results.