Resilient Adaptive Finite-Time Fault-Tolerant Control for Heterogeneous Uncertain and Nonlinear Autonomous Connected Vehicles Platoons

This paper addresses the control problem of heterogeneous uncertain nonlinear autonomous vehicle platoons in the presence of adversarial threats arising in Vehicular Ad-hoc NETworks (VANET) during the information sharing process. As unpredictable faults and/or malicious attacks may affect the trustworthiness of the messages shared among vehicles, a suitable resilient control law, able to enhance the robustness of the platoon formation, is required for the prevention of dangerous events. With the aim of achieving a safe platoon control, we leverage Multi-Agent System (MAS) framework and we design a novel distributed backstepping finite-time control strategy, embedding adaptive mechanisms able to guarantee vehicles fleet resilience with respect to possible occurring faults. The proposed strategy falls into the passive fault-tolerant control framework and, hence, it does not require additional observers for fault detection and isolation, thus reducing the computational burden. Adaptive mechanisms are designed according to Lyapunov-based theory which, in combination with the Barbalat lemma, ensures the stability of the closed-loop vehicular network. More specifically, our approach allows guaranteeing the convergence towards zero of the spacing and speed errors, while ensuring that all adaptive signals are bounded in a finite-time interval. A detailed simulation analysis, including a comparison w.r.t. the technical literature, confirms the theoretical derivation, the effectiveness and the advantages of the proposed resilient control law in ensuring platoon formation for different driving scenarios despite the occurrence of unexpected faults.