Consensus-based connected vehicles platoon control via impulsive control method

Abstract This paper focuses on the consensus of vehicle platoon with a leader and multiple connected followers. The objectives of platoon control are that the followers track the leader with a desired distance and all vehicles keep running with same speed. To achieve these objectives, we first time apply the impulsive control method on vehicle platoon, which can simplify the control and reduce the communication resource result from only information of vehicles at impulse instant transmitting and receiving. Combining impulsive control method with model transformation, we construct a vehicle tracking error system with impulse. Then, we propose a sufficient condition via matrix’s spectral-radius to stabilize the error system, namely, vehicle platoon reach consensus. A numerical example is carried out to show the performance of impulsive control.