Event-triggered control for vehicle platooning

This paper presents a method to control vehicular platoons in an event-triggered fashion. Therefore, every vehicle broadcasts its position and velocity information only at discrete event times. These events are determined by a trigger rule only depending on the agents state and on time. Two control architectures are considered. The first one, called symmetric bidirectional, uses information of the front and back neighbor in the control law. The architecture is analyzed with a linear controller and it is shown that the state error converges to an adjustable region around the origin. In earlier work it is suggested to use a nonlinear controller if solely information from the front neighbor is available. Thus, a nonlinear event-triggered predecessor-following control is developed and analyzed additionally. Not only bounds are given for the state of each vehicle, but it is also shown that the converging input converging state property holds. In both cases we guarantee the existence of a lower bound on the inter-event times. The benefits of both strategies are verified in numerical simulations.