Robustly String Stable Longitudinal Control for Vehicle Platoons Under Communication Failures: A Generalized Extended State Observer-Based Control Approach

This paper investigates the longitudinal control of vehicle platoons with a focus on external disturbances, parameter uncertainties, and communication failures. When vehicle platoons encounter vehicle to vehicle wireless communication failures, the preceding vehicle's acceleration is unavailable, which degrades the performance of the system. However, the existing achievements can not be directly used to address the aforementioned three issues. To this end, a generalized extended state observer-based control (GESOBC) law is contrived. First, the parameter uncertainties and the external disturbances are together regarded as a lumped disturbance. Then, a generalized extended state observer is designed to estimate the lumped disturbance and the preceding vehicle's acceleration, separately. Based on the estimation, a composite controller consisting of a state feedback control part and an estimation-based feedforward control part is developed. Furthermore, it is proved that the proposed GESOBC method can guarantee the exponentially bounded stability of the individual vehicle and the input to state string stability of the whole vehicle platoon. Finally, numerical simulations are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.