Platoon control with communication network constraints

This paper investigates the communication effect of the platoon control system, such as communication delays, packet dropouts and disorders. Here, the communication delays and packet dropouts problems are merged into the random distributed input delays problem. In order to solve the above problems, a novel data processing mechanism is proposed by building a Smart Data Processor (SDP). Base on the leader-predecessor-follower strategy, every following vehicle in the platoon system can select the latest data packets of the leader vehicle from the logic Data Packet Processor, obtained the current state information of its directly preceding vehicle by radar and matched the corresponding data from its Buffer. Base on the above structure, the platoon control problem transforms into a multi-objective H_∞-type synthesis problem with the random distributed time-varying delays. By employing the multi-objective H_∞-type synthesis, the asymptotic and string stability of the platoon system can be guaranteed. Then, the controller gain is derived by the linear matrix inequality (LMI). An experiments with laboratory scale Arduino cars show the efficiency of the proposed methods.