Event-triggered extended state observer based distributed control of nonlinear vehicle platoons

We study the platoon control of vehicles with third-order nonlinear dynamics under the constant time headway spacing policy. We consider a vehicle model with parameter uncertainties and external disturbances and propose a distributed control law based on an event-triggered extended state observer. First, an event-triggered extended state observer is designed to estimate the unmodeled dynamics in the vehicle model. Then based on the estimate of the unmodeled dynamics, a distributed control law is designed by using a modified dynamic surface control method. The control law of each follower vehicle only uses the information obtained by on-board sensors, including its own velocity, acceleration, the velocity difference between adjacent vehicles and the inter-vehicle distance. Finally, we give the range of the control parameters to ensure the stability of the vehicle platoon system. It is shown that the control parameters can be properly designed to make the observation errors of the extended state observers bounded and ensure the closed-loop stability. We prove that the Zeno behavior is avoided under the designed event-triggered mechanism. The joint simulations by using CarSim and MATLAB are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control law.