Hierarchical Planar Platoon Control Toward Tracking Safety for Distributed-Driven Vehicles

This paper deals with the planar platoon control problem of distributed-driven electric vehicles considering modeling deviations and driving disturbances. The follower vehicle is arranged to track the leader vehicle on curved roads with high tracking accuracy and driving security. A hierarchical integrated control framework is proposed based on disturbance-rejection robust model predictive control (DRRMPC) strategy and optimal control allocation (OCA) approach. The upper layer is a feedforward control layer, where a linear time-varying (LTV) model predictive controller (MPC) produces constrained predictive control towards a nominal model. The time-interval-based reference states are obtained from a “shadow following” trajectory generator through vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. In the middle layer, the feedback control consisting of a robust controller (RC) and the disturbance compensation out of an extended state observer (ESO), take effect to reconfigure the LTV vehicle model into the nominal model with an off-line calculated constraint tube. The bottom layer performs optimal control allocation among decoupled motor torques and wheel angles towards minimal tire force utilization. Hardware-in-the-Loop (HIL) experiment validates the effectiveness and practicability of the proposed platoon control strategy.