Performance-Oriented Event-Triggered Merging-Following Control of Multi-Lane Vehicles

This paper focuses on the merging-following control of vehicles standing on different lanes in presence of performance requirements and limited communication resources. A constraint of tracking error is developed to prescribe the performance, and then addressed via error mapping transformation, leading to a prescribed performance control (PPC) algorithm that can make the both distance and angular errors between consecutive vehicles evolve within the prescribed region. Then an event-triggered control protocol driven by the performance function is incorporated to reduce the signal transmission frequency between the controller and actuator with a performance-communication balance. Based on the Lyapunov stability proof, it is verified that all signals in the vehicular system remain uniformly ultimately bounded. A numerical simulation is presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.