A longitudinal control of an autonomous platoon with control input delays

For an autonomous platoon controlling, input data of the controller is the discrete data sampling by the sensor with a certain sampling period. The existing literatures, however, often are based on the continuous control mode. Thus the effect of control input delays on the autonomous platoon performance, which is caused by the sampling period, is ignored. In this paper, the control input delay caused by the sampling period is considered. For an autonomous platoon, the longitudinal following problem based on sampling control is investigated. Firstly, the sampling control is transformed to the controller with input delay by applying input-delay approach. And the nonlinear time-delay closed-loop control system for an autonomous platoon is established. For the nonlinear time-delay closed-loop control systems corresponding to the autonomous platoon, then, an asymptotic stability condition and the control gain are given in terms of linear matrix inequalities according to Lyapunov theory and an integral inequality. Furthermore, the exponential stability of an autonomous platoon is derived. Finally, the simulation results show that the proposed sampling control method make an autonomous platoon maintain a safe distance and keep the same speed.