Design, analysis and performance evaluation of a third order distributed protocol for platooning in the presence of time-varying delays and switching topologies

TLDR: In this article, a decentralized consensus protocol for platooning of non-identical vehicles in the presence of heterogeneous time-varying communication delays is proposed, which makes use of a state feedback and to this aim drivetrain dynamics are modeled as third-order linear systems.

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the problem of designing a decentralized consensus protocol for platooning of non-identical vehicles in the presence of heterogeneous time-varying communication delays The proposed control protocol makes use of a state feedback and to this aim drivetrain dynamics are modeled as third-order linear systems Necessary and sufficient conditions for convergence and exponential stability, derived by using an appropriate Krasovskii functional, demonstrate the ability of the platoon in reaching the required regime with an exponentially bounded behavior The proposed LMI-based approach allows to estimate both delay margin and decay rate Moreover, convergence is proven under switching communication network topologies by means of a Lyapunov-Razumikhin function, and the assessment of a string stable behavior has been also theoretically investigated High-fidelity simulations with P lexe show the effectiveness of the theoretical results in different driving conditions and in the presence of external disturbances and communication impairment Different communication channel models are used in the validation stage to further prove robustness of the proposed methodology with respect hard delay and packets losses