Sliding mode control for urban vehicles platooning

In the short term future, cybernetic transport systems (CTS), based on fully automated urban vehicles (the so-called Cybercars), will be seen on city roads and on new dedicated infrastructures. The objective of the Cybercars is to achieve a more effective organization of urban transport, resulting in a more rational use of motorized traffic, with less congestion and pollution and safer driving. One necessary functionality of Cybercars is the ability to cooperate and run in a platoon at close range. Platooning of these automatic guided cars is addressed in this paper, and decentralized control schemes for autonomous vehicle are proposed. Due to system uncertainties and the wide range of operating conditions, which are typical of the automotive context, a robust control technique is required to solve the problem. The robust control methodologies adopted in this paper are first order and second order sliding mode control, which result particularly suitable to deal with uncertain nonlinear time-varying systems. The proposed control schemes are compared through simulations.