Composite Adaptive Control of Heterogeneous Vehicle Platoon with a Virtual Platoon based Stability Analysis

Cooperative adaptive cruise control of the Vehicle Platoon is considered with bidirectional communication and heterogeneous parameters in the mathematical model. A model reference adaptive control algorithm is developed with the help of a homogeneous reference platoon. Unlike past works, this work deals with unknown engine efficiency, which leads to bi-linear parametric uncertainty. Classical adaptive law is augmented with a prediction error based term to design a composite adaptation technique for the bi-linear uncertain platoon model. Lyapunov based analysis along with the novel concept of virtual platoon (VP) establishes stability and convergence properties of the controller. Simulation results further validate the efficacy of the proposed algorithm.