Adaptive Bidirectional Platoon Control Using a Coupled Sliding Mode Control Method

This paper proposes an adaptive bidirectional platoon-control method for an interconnected vehicular system using a coupled sliding mode control (CSMC) to improve the performance and stability of the bidirectional platoon control and to guarantee string stability. The previous work in the field of platoon control is based on two strategies, i.e., the leader-predecessor and bidirectional strategies. In the case of the leader-predecessor strategy, all vehicles should use the information of all the leading and preceding vehicles. On the other hand, the bidirectional strategy uses the information of its neighboring preceding and following vehicles. Due to the drawbacks of the bidirectional strategy, most previous work has preferred to employ the leader-predecessor strategy, which can guarantee stability and improved performance. The bidirectional strategy is, however, advantageous in that its implementation of the actual system becomes much more feasible than that of the leader-predecessor strategy. Thus, to employ the platoon-control law to an actual system, we propose the platoon-control law using a CSMC method for an interconnected vehicular system based on the bidirectional strategy such that the problems arising from communication devices in the previous work can be overcome. In particular, unlike the previous work using the bidirectional strategy, the proposed adaptive platoon-control law can lead to improved control performance of the whole system and can guarantee string stability. The stability analysis and simulation results of the proposed method in the presence of uncertainties and disturbances are included to demonstrate the practical application of the proposed algorithm.