Design and experimental validation of event-triggered multi-vehicle cooperation in conflicting scenarios

Platoon control is widely studied for coordinating connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) on highways due to its potential for improving traffic throughput and road safety. Inspired by platoon control, the cooperation of multiple CAVs in conflicting scenarios can be greatly simplified by virtual platooning. Vehicle-to-vehicle communication is an essential ingredient in virtual platoon systems. Massive data transmission with limited communication resources incurs inevitable imperfections such as transmission delay and dropped packets. As a result, unnecessary transmission needs to be avoided to establish a reliable wireless network. To this end, an event-triggered robust control method is developed to reduce the use of communication resources while ensuring the stability of the virtual platoon system with time-varying uncertainty. The uniform boundedness, uniform ultimate boundedness, and string stability of the closed-loop system are analytically proved. As for the triggering condition, the uncertainty of the boundary information is considered, so that the threshold can be estimated more reasonably. Simulation and experimental results verify that the proposed method can greatly reduce data transmission while creating multi-vehicle cooperation. The threshold affects the tracking ability and communication burden, and hence an optimization framework for choosing the threshold is worth exploring in future research.