A Coupled Sliding Mode Control Strategy for Vehicle Platoons With Extended State Observer

In this paper, the stability problem of vehicle platoon with a constant time headway (CTH) policy, where each vehicle can utilize onboard sensor and wireless communication to achieve vehicle stability and string stability, is investigated. Firstly, in order to prevent the performance degradation of platoons influenced by uncertain dynamics of the vehicle and measurement complexity, an extended state observer (ESO) is designed to estimate system states and uncertain dynamics by only using position information. Then, a distributed platoon controller is designed by combining ESO and sliding mode control (SMC) to achieve string stability under the CTH policy. It should be noted that the coupled sliding surface in the designed controller is adopted to acquire the bidirectional information flow that can capture the connectivity of information exchange between vehicles. Finally, the numerical simulation is performed to demonstrate the validity of the proposed strategy.