This paper investigates the platoon control problems for a group of nonlinear vehicles, in which the road-friction coefficient between the vehicle and road is taken into consideration. When the road-friction coefficient is small, the platoon safety may be affected with small inter-vehicle spacing headway. Hence, to improve the vehicle platoon safety with various road frictions, a novel spacing policy is developed for the vehicle platoon. This spacing policy is obtained by optimizing a certain safety cost function, which contains both the vehicle positions and the road-friction coefficients. Accordingly, the vehicle platoon would automatically adjust the inter-vehicle spaces to match the road friction. On this basis, a nonlinear vehicle platoon control scheme is proposed such that the vehicles can asymptotically converge to the proposed spacing policy. Particularly, a state observer is developed to approximate the vehicle states, such that only the position measurements can be applied to the control scheme. Moreover, the stability of proposed platoon tracking system is strictly analyzed. In final, numerical simulations are provided to verify the effectiveness and feasibility of proposed approaches.

This paper investigates the dynamic coverage control problem for a group of agents with unknown density function. A cost function, depending on a certain metric and the density function, is defined to describe the performance of coverage network. Since the optimal deployment of agents is closely depending on the density function, we employ the Bayesian prediction approaches to estimate the density function. Moreover, a novel coverage-control-customized algorithm is proposed to acquire the Bayesian parameters. The merits of this Bayesian-based spatial estimation algorithm are the consideration of measurement noise and the capability of dealing time-varying density function. However, the estimated density function from Bayesian framework follows normal distribution, which leads the cost function to a stochastic process. To deal with this type of cost function, a discrete control scheme is proposed to steer the agents approaching to a near-optimal deployment. The mean-square stability of the proposed coverage system is further analyzed. Finally, numerical simulations are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approaches.

This paper investigates the output feedback control problem of a vehicle platoon with a constant time headway (CTH) policy, where each vehicle can communicate with its consecutive vehicles. Firstly, based on the integrated-sliding-mode (ISM) technique, a neural adaptive sliding-mode control algorithm is developed to ensure that the vehicle platoon is moving with the CTH policy and full state measurement. Then, to further decrease the measurement complexity and reduce the communication load, an output feedback control protocol is proposed with only position information, in which a higher order sliding-mode observer is designed to estimate the other required information (velocities and accelerations). In order to avoid collisions among the vehicles, the string stability of the whole vehicle platoon is proven through the stability theorem. Finally, numerical simulation results are provided to verify its effectiveness and advantages over the traditional sliding-mode control method in vehicle platoons.

In this paper, the vehicle platoon control problems for a group of heterogeneous vehicles are investigated, where the multiple constraints of the vehicles and the communication delays among the vehicles are taken into consideration. A distributed model predictive control (DMPC) scheme is proposed to drive the heterogeneous vehicles into the desired platoon. In this DMPC framework, the multiple constraints, including the control constraints, state constraints, and jerk constraints, are employed to describe the practical characteristics of vehicles and the communication delays are time-varying and bounded. In this framework, a group of platoon control schemes is proposed based on the DMPC techniques. Furthermore, the feasibility and stability of the proposed vehicle platoon control system are strictly analyzed. Finally, numerical simulation and experiment with TurtleBot3 mobile robots are provided to validate the effectiveness of proposed approaches.

This paper investigates the nonlinear vehicle platoon control problems with external disturbances. The quadratic spacing policy (QSP) is applied into the platoon control, in which the desired intervehicle distance is a quadratic function in terms of the vehicle’s velocities. Comparing with the general constant time headway policy (CTHP), the QSP is more suitable to the human driving behaviors (HDB) and can improve the traffic capacity. Then, a novel platoon control scheme is proposed based on the distributed integrated sliding mode (DISM). Since the external disturbances are taken into consideration, the sliding mode method is employed to handle the disturbances. Moreover, the stability and string stability of the proposed platoon control system are strictly analyzed. In final, numerical simulations are provided to verify the proposed approaches.

In this paper, a mobile robot motion planning method with modified BIT* (batch informed trees) and MPC (Model Predictive Control) is presented. The conventional BIT* was modified here by integrating a stretch method that improves the path points connections, to get a collision-free path more quickly. After getting a reference path, the MPC method is employed to determine the motion at each moment with a given objective function. In the objective function, a repulsive function based on the direction and distance of the obstacles is introduced to avoid the robot being too close to the obstacle, so the safety can be ensured. Simulation results show the good navigation performance of the whole framework in different scenarios.