Distributed Adaptive Sliding Mode Control for Vehicle Platoon with Uncertain Driving Resistance and Actuator Saturation

Vehicle platoon has been demonstrated to be a promising driving pattern for its prominent advantages in enhancing traffic safety, improving highway capacity, and increasing fuel economy as well as reducing carbon emissions. However, the uncertain driving resistance and saturated actuator output decay the control performance and may even lead to the instability of a vehicle platoon. Therefore, a distributed adaptive sliding mode control algorithm for vehicle platoon with uncertain driving resistance and actuator saturation is proposed in this paper. First of all, sliding mode control technique, together with the coupled sliding surface (CSS) method, is adopted to design the vehicle platoon control algorithm and an adaptive updating law is proposed to estimate the unknown driving resistance coefficients. Then, for the problem of actuator saturation, an antiwindup compensation-based approach is utilized to attenuate the integral windup of the adaptive platoon control laws in the case of actuator saturation. In addition, considering the chattering problem inherent in sliding mode control, a sigmoid-like function is deployed to weaken the influence of chattering, which is expected to enhance the driving comfortableness. Both theoretical analysis and numerical simulation verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed vehicle platoon algorithm.