Cooperative Spacing Sampled Control of Vehicle Platoon Considering Undirected Topology and Analog Fading Networks

The work on this paper studies the combined effect of vehicle dynamics, sampling period and the quality of inter-vehicle sensing and communication on the performance of platoon control. First, we induce the sampled control protocol from continuous–time linear consensus protocol by employing zero–order hold circuit and periodic sampling technology, then by virtue of the obtained sampled control protocol, the continuous–time platoon system is equivalently transformed into a discrete–time system. Second, for the inter–vehicle communication with ideal channel and under undirected information flow topology (UIFT), the stability thresholds of control gains are explicitly established by solving a discrete–time simultaneous stabilization problem, bilinear transformation and the Routh-Hurwitz stability criterion. Meanwhile, to ensure the fastest asymptotic stability of the platoon dynamics, we propose an optimal asymptotic convergence factor and a correspondingly optimal sampled control protocol. Third, For the inter–vehicle communication with identical fading networks and under UIFT, through solving a modified Riccati inequality, we provide a sampled control protocol depending not only on information flow topology (IFT) and sampling period, but also on the statistics of the inter–vehicle communication channel. Besides, employing Lyapunov inequality in probability theory, we show a necessary condition for the sampled control protocol ensuring the platoon dynamics mean square stable. Finally, simulations are performed to demonstrate the theory’s discoveries.