Adaptive Multi‐Lane Fusion Control for 2‐D Plane Vehicle Platoon With Delayed‐Imposed Distance Constraints and Actuator Faults

ABSTRACT This paper proposes an adaptive multi‐lane fusion control strategy for a 2‐D plane vehicle platoon with delayed imposed distance constraints (DIDC) and actuator faults. DIDC is a novel distance constraint strategy that allows vehicles to operate freely at the initial stage and gradually enforces the constraint, thereby avoiding excessive early control efforts and enhancing flexibility in distance regulation. To handle the discontinuity caused by transitioning from no constraints to constraints, a shifting function and a transformed error function are designed, converting constrained variables into unconstrained ones while keeping the unconstrained part unchanged. Additionally, dead‐zone and actuator fault inputs are linearized, and unknown nonlinearities functions are approximated by radial basis function neural networks (RBFNNs) with weight update laws based on gradient descent to ensure fast convergence. Sliding‐mode controllers are developed for position and angle to achieve multi‐lane fusion and maintain platoon stability. Simulations and comparative analyses validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.