Hierarchical Safe Control of Heterogeneous Vehicle Platoons under Nonidentical Uncertain Networks

The impact of nonidentical uncertain communication network on the performance of heterogeneous vehicle platoons is investigated through output feedback, where the communication network is modeled as nonidentical multiplicative noise that can effectively capture packet dropout, random delay, and channel fading. Firstly, to address vehicle platoons heterogeneity, a hierarchical safe control framework is utilized, where the upper layer observer is used to observe the state of the leader and the lower layer controller is responsible for tracking the observer states. Secondly, by leveraging the properties of weighted Laplacians, Lyapunov function and matrix singular value decomposition, sufficient conditions for upper layer observer states consensus are derived for undirected information flow (UIF) and directed information flow (DIF) topologies, respectively. These conditions are related to the maximum eigenvalue of the communication topology and the variance of nonidentical uncertainties. Thirdly, using output feedback control, corresponding lower layer distributed controllers are designed to track the upper layer observer states, where the controller gains are independent of the communication topology structure. Ultimately, numerical experiments are performed to validate the obtained outcomes.