Robust Platoon Control of Industrial Heavy-Load Autonomous Vehicles

Platoon control of autonomous industrial vehicles contributes to improving the safety and reliability of cargo transportation in complex industrial scenarios, increasing traffic efficiency and saving energy. The platoon control of autonomous heavy-load industrial vehicles is much harder, as the high robustness requirements, low hardware ability and complex un-structural environments. This paper considers the platoon control task from the view-point of practical industrial applications. Firstly, the longitudinal dynamic model of the heavy-load industrial vehicle is transferred into a first-order damping acceleration response model by introducing the low-level feedback linearization control and compensations. Secondly, the synchronization control concept is introduced and a fully distributed control law is presented, which only requires the coupling information of the two nearest neighbors. In particular, in order to ensure the practical applicability, the information processing delays, data samplings and external control disturbances are explicitly modelled and the global stability analysis approach is presented. Finally, we provide real experiments using full-scale industrial heavy-load vehicles to demonstrate our effectiveness and robustness.