ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces a distributed finite time adaptive integral sliding mode control approach for a platoon of vehicles consisting of a leader and multiple followers subjected to bounded unknown disturbances. The adaptive control scheme does not require the exact knowledge of maximum and minimum values of the external disturbances, which is desirable for practical applications. In order to avoid collisions in the inter-connected vehicles, control strategies based on constant time headway policy which is known to improve strong string stability are developed for both cases of zero and nonzero initial spacing errors. The chattering phenomenon caused by Integral Sliding Model (ISM) control method is reduced by introducing continuous approximations. The chapter presents a new distributed adaptive ISM control protocol to achieve the finite time stability finite time stability of each vehicle and the strong string stability strong string stability of the whole vehicle platoon system in the presence of external disturbances.
