Prescribed-Time Performance Platoon Control for Heterogeneous Connected Autonomous Vehicles With Information Protection Spacing Policy

This work addresses the adaptive prescribed-time performance platoon control (PTP-PC) problem for heterogeneous connected autonomous vehicles, which faces two key challenges: invading vehicle tracking and unknown overall disturbance. An information protection spacing policy is proposed to tackle the issue of tracking platoon by the invading vehicle. Besides, the variable gain nonlinear extended state observers (NESOs) and variable gain hyperbolic tangent tracking differentiators (HTTDs) are designed to effectively address the overall disturbance and complexity explosion issues, respectively. To obtain the specified transient and steady-state performance for the entire platoon, a prescribed-time performance function is established. On the basis of the above presented techniques, a distributed adaptive PTP-PC scheme is developed to ensure the vehicular bistability and superior prescribed performance. For practical considerations, both numerical simulations and co-simulation experiments based on PRESCAN/SIMULINK have been conducted to simulate a traffic scenario involving the transportation of college entrance examination papers, and the results have verified the feasibility of the developed scheme.