Hybrid control for cooperative vehicle-platoon via the hardware-in-the-loop simulator

Cooperative driving for vehicle platoon is one of the crucial application and demonstration in the field of Intelligent Vehicle-Highway Systems (IVHS). It is very important to use both hybrid dynamical system and hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS) to study cooperative vehicle platoon system. In the paper, different cooperative states of vehicle platoon with hybrid logic are proposed, and validation via HILS is presented. Since the desired velocity, spacing and length of the vehicle platoon are given discretely and arbitrarily, there are usually discontinuities or discrete jumps between desired and current vehicle platoon states immediately after states transition. Hybrid automata is designed to minimize the performance degradation resulting from the state transition by using finite state machine (FSM), Terminal sliding mode control (TSMC) is applied to design a combined longitudinal and lateral controller, whose stability during the state transition is guaranteed by the Lyapunov function. Furthermore, the validation via HILS is performed with a minimum of cost and effort compared to the field test of a real vehicle platoon. In the end, the various cooperative maneuvers and scenarios test are considered and the corresponding performance of the controller is shown in the end.