Distributed Platoon Control of Nonlinear Vehicles with Event-Triggered Extended State Observers: Closed-Loop Stability

We study the platoon control based on nonlinear vehicle models. A third-order vehicle model with parameter uncertainties and external disturbances is considered and the constant spacing policy is adopted. The control law of each follower vehicle only depends on the information obtained by on-board sensors, including its own velocity, acceleration, the velocity of the preceding vehicle and the inter-vehicle distance. Firstly, an event-triggered extended state observer (ESO) is designed to estimate the unmodeled dynamics in the vehicle model. Then based on the estimate, a distributed control law is presented by using the dynamic surface control method. We show that the control parameters can be properly designed to make the observation errors of the ESOs bounded and ensure that the inter-vehicle distance errors enter into a small neighborhood of zero. We prove that the Zeno behavior is avoided under the designed event-triggered mechanism. The effectiveness of the proposed control law is demonstrated by numerical simulations.