Distributed Model Predictive Control for Heterogeneous Vehicle Platoon With Inter-Vehicular Spacing Constraints

This paper proposes a distributed control scheme for a platoon of heterogeneous vehicles based on the mechanism of model predictive control (MPC). The platoon composes of a group of vehicles interacting with each other via inter-vehicular spacing constraints, to avoid collision and reduce communication latency, and aims to make multiple vehicles driving on the same lane safely with a close range and the same velocity. Each vehicle is subject to both state constraints and input constraints, communicates only with neighboring vehicles, and may not know a priori desired setpoint. We divide the computation of control inputs into several local optimization problems based on each vehicle’s local information. To compute the control input of each vehicle based on local information, a distributed computing method must be adopted and thus the coupled constraint is required to be decoupled. This is achieved by introducing the reference state trajectories from neighboring vehicles for each vehicle and by employing the interactive structure of computing local problems of vehicles with odd indices and even indices. It is shown that the feasibility of MPC optimization problems is achieved at all time steps based on tailored terminal inequality constraints, and the asymptotic stability of each vehicle to the desired trajectory is guaranteed even under a single iteration between vehicles at each time. Finally, a comparison simulation is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed MPC method for heterogeneous vehicle control with respect to normal and extreme scenarios.