Robust Platoon Control of Mixed Autonomous and Human-Driven Vehicles for Obstacle Collision Avoidance: A Cooperative Sensing-Based Adaptive Model Predictive Control Approach

Obstacle detection and platoon control for mixed traffic flows, comprising human-driven vehicles (HDVs) and connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), face challenges from uncertain disturbances, such as sensor faults, inaccurate driver operations, and mismatched model errors. Furthermore, misleading sensing information or malicious attacks in vehicular wireless networks can jeopardize CAVs’ perception and platoon safety. In this paper, we develop a two-dimensional robust control method for a mixed platoon, including a single leading CAV and multiple following HDVs that incorporate robust information sensing and platoon control. To effectively detect and locate unknown obstacles ahead of the leading CAV, we propose a cooperative vehicle–infrastructure sensing scheme and integrate it with an adaptive model predictive control scheme for the leading CAV. This sensing scheme fuses information from multiple nodes while suppressing malicious data from attackers to enhance robustness and attack resilience in a distributed and adaptive manner. Additionally, we propose a distributed car-following control scheme with robustness to guarantee the following HDVs, considering uncertain disturbances. We also provide theoretical proof of the string stability under this control framework. Finally, extensive simulations are conducted to validate our approach. The simulation results demonstrate that our method can effectively filter out misleading sensing information from malicious attackers, significantly reduce the mean-square deviation in obstacle sensing, and approach the theoretical error lower bound. Moreover, the proposed control method successfully achieves obstacle avoidance for the mixed platoon while ensuring stability and robustness in the face of external attacks and uncertain disturbances.