Constraint-oriented integrated longitudinal and lateral robust control for connected and automated vehicle platoons

The coupling, nonlinearity, and uncertainty characteristics of vehicle dynamics make the accurate longitudinal and lateral control of an automated and connected vehicle platoon a tough task. Little research has been conducted to fully address the characteristics. By using the ideology of constraint-following control this article proposes an integrated longitudinal and lateral adaptive robust control methodology for a vehicle platoon with a bidirectional communication topology. The platoon control objectives contain the path tracking stability, the platoon internal stability, and the string stability. First, we establish the nonlinear kinematics path tracking model and the coupled vehicle longitudinal and lateral dynamical model that contains time-varying uncertainties. Second, we design a series of nonlinear equality constraints that directly guarantee the control objectives based on the kinematic relations. On this basis, an adaptive robust constraint-following control is proposed. It is shown that the control guarantees the uniform boundedness and the uniform ultimate boundedness of the constraint-following error and the uncertainty estimation error. Finally, simulation results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.