Event-Triggered Extended State Observer Based Platoon Control of Heterogeneous Vehicles Using Only Inter-Vehicle Distances

In this paper, the platoon control of heterogeneous vehicles with input saturations, uncertain parameters and external perturbations is studied and a distributed control law that relies only on the inter-vehicle distance is proposed. Firstly, a model of state differences between neighbouring vehicles is given, where the saturation function of the control input is approximated by a differentiable function. Secondly, based on the state difference model, an event-triggered extended state observer (ESO) is presented, whose input is the inter-vehicle distance and whose output is the estimates of the state differences between neighbouring vehicles and unmodeled dynamics in the state difference model. Finally, an anti-saturation auxiliary system is introduced, by using which and the output of the ESO, a dynamic surface control-based distributed control law is proposed. The stability analysis of the vehicle platoon is performed and the design schemes of control parameters are given to ensure the stability of the closed-loop system and to avoid the Zeno behavior. The feasibility of our approach is demonstrated by some numerical simulations.