Distributed H ∞ Control Of Platoon Interacted by Switching and Undirected Topology

To deal with the challenges caused by the weakness of wireless communication, this paper presents a distributed H∞ control strategy for platooning of automatic vehicles (AVs) connected by switching and undirected topologies. With the compensation of the powertrain nonlinearities by an inverse model, the node dynamics is described by a linear system with bounded uncertainty. Then the platoon system controlled by a distributed state-feedback controller is decomposed into multiple low order subsystems by applying the eigenvalue decomposition and linear transformation. The open gain of these subsystems dependends on the eigenvalues of the topological matrix. The sufficient condition for the H∞ performance of platoon is proved by using the invariant of signal amplitude of the linear transformation. A numerical way is further provided to solve the distributed controller by using the LMI approach. For this new synthesis method, only the bounds of the topological eigenvalues are necessary. And the designed state-feedback can control the platoon composed of disturbed nodes and interacted by uncertain even switching topologies in a satisfactory way. The effectiveness of this distributed H∞ control strategy is validated by comparative bench tests between nominal and disturbed conditions.