ABSTRACT
This chapter investigates the adaptive platoon control for nonlinear vehicular systems with asymmetric nonlinear input deadzone and neighboring vehicular spacing constraints. Vehicular platoon control encounters great challenges from unmodeled dynamic uncertainties, unknown external disturbances, unknown asymmetric nonlinear input dead zone and neighboring vehicular spacing constraints. A vehicular platoon must exhibit both individual stability and stability as a group while avoiding collisions between consecutive vehicles. The control problem of systems with actuator deadzone nonlinearities is a significant and challenging research topic as such nonlinearities are always present in real plants, particularly in mechanical systems. The presence of deadzone nonlinearities may cause undesirable control accuracy, limit cycles, and even instability, and its study has been drawing much interest in the control community for a long time. Based on a symmetric barrier Lyapunov function, the collision between consecutive vehicles as well as the connectivity breaks owing to limited sensing capabilities are avoided.
