Distributed Finite-Time Fault-Tolerant Control for Heterogeneous Vehicular Platoon With Saturation

This paper investigates the distributed fault-tolerant control problem for the heterogeneous vehicular platoon system (HVPS) suffering from actuator faults, saturation, and external disturbances. Firstly, an exponential spacing policy is developed to tackle the string stability (SS) and traffic flow stability issues when the actuator faults occur. Then, a nonlinear observer is developed to estimate the saturation approximation error, bias fault, and external disturbances. Moreover, to achieve the SS of the whole system in finite-time and fault tolerance ability, a distributed adaptive fault-tolerant control scheme based on bidirectional-leader information flow topology is proposed. Adaptive estimation laws are also involved to estimate and update the unknown parameters, in which the effect of actuator saturation can be compensated. Finally, the SS in finite-time and traffic flow stability of the closed-loop system are proved, respectively. Experiment results and comparisons demonstrate the feasibly and advantages of the method.