Cooperative Platoon Control of Automated Industrial Vehicles: A Synchronization Approach and Real-World Experiments

Compared with the electric passenger cars or trucks, the cooperative platoon control task of automated industrial vehicles suffers from several different challenges, from the aspects of information-gathering issues, control stability issues, and hardware system development and retrofitting challenges. In this article, we investigate the cooperative platoon control task of automated industrial vehicles and build a synchronization-based approach. A fully distributed controller is presented based on the cross-coupling strategy, and a global stability analysis approach is presented with explicitly considering the neighboring vehicles' information-gathering delays and data samplings. In system design, we formulate the platoon control system as the most general case, and we show that the existing controllers can be proved as simplifications of our controller under special cases. In addition, in order to achieve practical applications, a general retrofitting framework is presented for diesel industrial vehicles, and the onboard perception system is further established. Finally, platoon control experiments with real industrial vehicles demonstrate our effectiveness and practical applicability, while large-scale simulations validate our robustness to external disturbances, time-varying information gathering delays, and random packet drops.