Compensator-Based Fixed-Time Prescribed Performance Control of Vehicular Platoon With Input Nonlinearities: A Performance Boundary Self-Adjusting Approach

This paper investigates fixed-time prescribed performance control issue of vehicular platoon subject to input nonlinearities induced by actuator dead-zone and saturation. Due to the occurrence of input nonlinearities, the spacing error increases, which may exceed the desired performance requirement. To deal with the dilemma, by merging an auxiliary variable, an improved prescribed performance control scheme is developed with a remarkable advantage that the performance boundary can be self-adjusted when actuator nonlinearities occur, while guaranteeing the tracking error tend to the predefined region in a fixed time. Then, with the help of an error transformation, an adaptive fixed-time sliding mode control approach is proposed, in which a new compensator with faster convergence is designed to eliminate the influence of actuator nonlinearities in a better way. The rigorous analysis shows that the given scheme is capable of guaranteeing fixed-time compounded individual vehicle stability, fixed-time string stability and reachability of fixed-time prescribed performance. Lastly, numerical simulations and experiments are carried out to verify the feasibility of the proposed platoon control protocol.