This paper investigates a vehicular platoon control problem with prescribed tracking performance in the presence of actuator saturation, uncertain parameters and unknown disturbances. Two adaptive sliding mode control schemes based on leader-predecessor and leader-bidirectional information flows are presented to ensure string stability and strong string stability, respectively, with a prescribed tracking performance. The actuator saturation nonlinearity is addressed by approximating it with a smooth hyperbolic tangent function. The effects of uncertain parameters and exogenous disturbances are dealt with by introducing a set of adaptation laws. The effectiveness of the proposed control schemes is demonstrated via numerical simulation results.

This paper investigates control design for the platoon of automated vehicles whose sensors have limited sensing capability. A novel hybrid platoon model is established, in which actuator delay (e.g., the fueling and braking delay) and the effect of sensing range limitation are involved. Based on the new model, a framework of guaranteed-cost controller design is presented, which can robustly stabilize the platoon of vehicles with a given level of disturbance attenuation. The obtained controller is complemented by additional conditions that were established to guarantee string stability and zero steady-state spacing error, yielding a useful string-stable platoon control algorithm. The effectiveness and advantage of the presented methodology is demonstrated by both numerical simulations and experiments with laboratory-scale Arduino cars.

In this paper, we investigate formation tracking control of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) with model parameter uncertainties and external disturbances. The external disturbances due to the wind, waves, and ocean currents are combined with the model parameter uncertainties as a compound disturbance. Then a disturbance observer (DO) is introduced to estimate the compound disturbance, which can be achieved within a finite time independent of the initial estimation error. Based on a DO, a novel fixed-time sliding control scheme is developed, by which the follower vehicle can track the leader vehicle with all the states globally stabilized within a given settling time. The effectiveness and performance of the method are demonstrated by numerical simulations.