Cooperative Platoon Control of Heterogeneous Vehicles Under a Novel Event-Triggered Communication Strategy

This paper investigates the cooperative platoon control problem of heterogeneous vehicles. Under a leader and predecessor following communication structure, each following vehicle tracks the state of the leader while maintaining a constant spacing between successive vehicles. To reduce the utilization of communication resources, a new event-triggered communication strategy (ETCS) is proposed, where the current data of the following vehicle is transmitted to its direct successor only when the difference between the current data and the last transmitted data exceeds a state-dependent threshold. By properly designing the threshold, the number of data transmissions near the steady state is greatly reduced. The tracking errors of all vehicles are shown to be bounded while Zeno behavior can be avoided under the ETCS. The advantages of the proposed ETCS are discussed by comparing with the existing strategies. Moreover, to deal with the heterogeneity of the vehicles’ dynamics, a decentralized and computationally efficient method is presented to solve the non-identical control gains of all the vehicles. The numerical simulations have been conducted to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.