Distributed Controller Design for Vehicle Platooning under Packet Drop Scenario

Abstract

This paper proposes a distributed control strategy for homogeneous platoon systems with external disturbances under random packet drop scenario which can occur due to underlying network among the vehicles in a platoon. An linear matrix inequality (LMI) based approach is used to obtain the controller gains for ensuring the stability with bounded H∞ norm for such systems. Effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated with numerical results considering different network topologies in a platoon under single packet drop. The variation of H∞ norm bound for different number of platoon members under the different structure of network topologies and the packet drop has been studied in this paper.

DistributedH∞ Controller Design and Robustness Analysis for Vehicle Platooning Under Random Packet Drop

“…packet drop, communication delay etc.) in [14], [24], [30] and [9], [31], respectively, considering either algebraic graph theory and syncronisation of dynamical systems [9], [14] or both algebraic graph theory and concepts of networked control systems (NCS) [30] to maintain the cooperative platoon motion.…”

“…For the consensus problem of networked multi-agent systems, various controller design methodologies, e.g., MPC [16], [32], [33], state-feedback [34], [35], H ∞ controller [15], [18], [30] etc. have been investigated.…”

“…Utilizing the concept of synchronisation problem of multi-agent systems, Tang et al [22] have considered homogeneous platoons and have designed an LMI-based distributed state-feedback controller to achieve the coordinated vehicle motion under packet loss modelled as a Bernoulli distribution. The works presented in [22], [30], [34], [37]- [39] modelled random packet drops as a mean packet drop rate using Bernoulli probabilistic distribution and considered symmetric packet drop rate in the communication link for the synchronisation problem of multi agent system with undirected topology. In [14], a Lyapunov based design has been adopted to find out the maximum communication delay that preserves the consensus.…”

“…For consensus control of heterogeneous platoon systems, a time-varying communication delay has been considered in [40] and both probabilistic packet drops and time-varying communication delays have been considered in [24]. However, amongst these controller design approaches, H ∞ controller has become popular due to its robustness and disturbance attenuation properties [15], [18], [30], [41]- [44] and references therein. For the homogeneous platoon control problem, stability and performance have been analysed by designing an LMI-based distributed H ∞ controller where packet drops were modelled by using both Bernoulli distributions and Markov chains [45].…”

“…The platoon control objective is twofold [9]: (i) to impose the leader's velocity to all followers and (ii) maintain a given inter-vehicular distance between consecutive platoon vehicles specified by a spacing policy [9], [15], [30]. If a constant spacing is adopted and d i,i−1 , i = 1, 2, .…”