Adaptive Control for Uncertain Nonlinear Vehicular Systems and Platoons

This paper studies adaptive control of vehicular systems and platoons, focusing on electric vehicles. An adaptive control law, closely related to the MIT-rule, is employed to control the vehicular longitudinal motion. Its use in cooperative adaptive cruise control is analyzed. Different from the known work in the existing literature, model nonlinearities and parameter uncertainties are taken into consideration. It is reported that the proposed adaptive control law renders the uncertain nonlinear vehicular system strict output passive and the closed-loop vehicular system admitting the £<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</inf>-gain strictly smaller than 1 without estimating vehicular parameters. Furthermore, the distributed adaptive control law achieves the string stability related to velocity synchronization and inter-vehicle distances. Simulation results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed adaptive control law.