Cooperative Robust Fault-Tolerant Control for Vehicular Platoon Systems With Performance Limitations and Various Uncertainties

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) of the vehicular platoon system is challenging due to simultaneous existences of heterogeneous performance limitations, time varying unknown leader input, and various uncertainties. To address this problem, this study introduces a new cooperative robust fault-tolerant control (CRFTC) approach to enhance the safety of CACC systems. First, an intermediate based cooperative estimation method is designed to simultaneously estimate the heterogeneous performance limitations of perception and actuation, matched disturbances, and leader's input for platoon members. Then, a distributed CRFTC method is developed to accommodate the effects of performance limitations, matched disturbances while suppressing the mismatched disturbances, so that car-following consistency can be achieved. Furthermore, optimal gains of the proposed CRFTC w.r.t. predecessor leader following (PLF), bi-directional (BD) and predecessor following (PF) communication network topologies are derived using linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). The <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$H_{\infty }$</tex-math></inline-formula> performances of the proposed CRFTC are analyzed based on Lyapunov stability theory. Finally, comparative simulations are conducted for CACC systems with PLF, BD and PF topologies to demonstrate the advantages of the CRFTC on improving the safety and stability.