Toward Robust Vehicle Platooning With Bounded Spacing Error

Intelligent transportation has become an essential field of cyber-physical systems. Among various intelligent transportation technologies, the automated highway system (AHS) has its unique advantage of being able to coordinate a platoon of vehicles as a whole unit. The major challenge of building a robust AHS is the nonlinear and (potentially) fast time-varying uncertainty induced by parameter variations and external disturbances. Finally, reflected as the spacing between neighboring vehicles, such uncertainties can be a serious concern for maintaining safety. This paper addresses the problem by proposing a mathematical transformation scheme to bound the spacing error and build a distributed control algorithm on such a basis. The propose algorithm achieves a spacing error satisfying both uniformly boundedness and uniformly ultimate boundedness. Our decentralized algorithm is communication efficient in the sense that it only requires the state information of the preceding car and the acceleration feedback and does not need to communicate with all other cars.