Specified-time Vehicular Platoon Control with Flexible Safe Distance Constraint

The platoon control for vehicles can efficiently reduce traffic pressure. Current control schemes are able to achieve stable platoon control, but cannot guarantee collision avoidance, connectivity preservation and convergence time at the same time. In this paper, we propose a novel control scheme that can simultaneously guarantee the safe distance and communication connectivity, which is called flexible safe distance constraint, and also can guarantee the specified convergence time. A dynamic gain based distributed control law is first designed for the vehicle with single-integral model. Using the prescribed transient and steady-state performance control approach, the flexible safe distance constraint can be satisfied. Using the time transformation method and Lyapunov stability theory, the closed-loop systems under the proposed protocols can achieve stable platoon within the specified time. Compared with some existing results, the novelty of this work is that the proposed approaches allow a vehicle to converge with the platoon within any preset time without dependence on the initial conditions or system parameters. Another contribution of this work is to propose specified-time platoon control protocols for the vehicle with double-integral model under a flexible safe distance constraint. Furthermore, in order to get closer to the actual system, the controller is extended to the triple-integral system, and some special cases are also discussed. Finally, some simulations are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed protocols.