Robustness Analysis and Controller Synthesis of Homogeneous Vehicular Platoons With Bounded Parameter Uncertainty

The platooning of automated vehicles can significantly benefit road transportation in terms of traffic capacity, fuel efficiency, etc. This paper presents a robust distributed control method for vehicular platoons with bounded parameter uncertainty and a broad spectrum of interaction topologies. The nonlinear node dynamics are reduced to an uncertain linear model by using inverse model compensation. The interaction topology is modeled as a directed graph, leading to high-dimensional linear platoon dynamics with parameter uncertainties existing in both state matrix and input matrix. For the topologies with real and/or complex eigenvalues, a sufficient condition for robust stability is derived through the similarity transformation and Lyapunov stability theory, whose benefit lies in the fact that this condition is completely defined in real number field. A Riccati inequality-based robust controller synthesis algorithm is presented whose computation complexity is independent of platoon size. The proposed method is validated by a series of simulations with high-order nonlinear vehicle models.