Distributed Integrated Sliding Mode-Based Nonlinear Vehicle Platoon Control with Quadratic Spacing Policy

This paper investigates the nonlinear vehicle platoon control problems with external disturbances. The quadratic spacing policy (QSP) is applied into the platoon control, in which the desired intervehicle distance is a quadratic function in terms of the vehicle’s velocities. Comparing with the general constant time headway policy (CTHP), the QSP is more suitable to the human driving behaviors (HDB) and can improve the traffic capacity. Then, a novel platoon control scheme is proposed based on the distributed integrated sliding mode (DISM). Since the external disturbances are taken into consideration, the sliding mode method is employed to handle the disturbances. Moreover, the stability and string stability of the proposed platoon control system are strictly analyzed. In final, numerical simulations are provided to verify the proposed approaches.