Integral Adaptive Sliding Mode Control for Vehicle Platoon with Disturbance Observer

This article proposes an integral adaptive sliding mode control (IASMC) strategy that combines adaptive reaching laws and disturbance observers (DO) for vehicle platoon system subject to unknown disturbance. The objective is to ensure the string stability and make the spacing error between any front and rear vehicles in the platoon be zero, which means that the vehicles are driven at the expected spacing. To achieve it, the bidirectional (BD) topology and the constant time headway (CTH) policy are employed. Then, an adaptive smoothed sliding mode reaching law is constructed to eliminate the chattering issue. The unknown disturbances can be estimated by the designed DO. Meanwhile, the Lyapunov method is applied to the analysis and proof of the stability of the designed IASMC strategy, and the Laplace transform is used in the proof of the string stability. Finally, based on simulation, it can be seen that the availability and superiority of the designed strategy can be verified.