Stabilizing a Vehicle Platoon with the Unidirectional Distributed Adaptive Sliding Mode Control

This paper deals with the problem of stability of one dimensional vehicle chain with double integral terms. Disturbance inputs can affect the performance of vehicle chain and furthermore can lead to instability namely called string instability. It is proposed a distributed adaptive sliding mode control for each vehicle. In the proposed distributed adaptive sliding mode controller it is not necessary to know the value of upper and lower bounds of disturbance inputs. only the information of two successive vehicles in front is enough to implement the controller, this means that each vehicle is connected unidirectionally in the vehicle chain with no information of the following vehicles. We prove that with such condition it is possible to guarantee string stability in the vehicle chain. Furthermore, constant spacing error between the vehicles without using time headway policy, is used. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown as well with simulation results.