Cooperative Control for Vehicle Platooning: a Complex Network approach

The aim of the thesis is to analyze and solve platooning by treating it as consensus problem in a network of dynamical systems affected by time-varying heterogeneous delays due to Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication among vehicles. Specifically, the platoon is represented as a dynamical network where: i) each vehicle, with its own dynamics, is a node; ii) the information flow through the communication links among neighboring vehicles is represented by edges; iii) the structure of the inter-vehicle communication is encoded in the network topology. A distributed coupling protocol is presented, composed by two terms acting on every vehicle in the platoon: a local action, depending on the state variables of the vehicle itself (measured on-board), and a network action depending on the information shared among neighboring vehicles through the V2V communication. The asymptotic stability of the closed-loop vehicular network is analytically proven by using the Lyapunov-Razumikhin theorem and numerical results show the robustness of the approach with respect to communication losses and disturbances acting on the platoon leading dynamics during the platoon motion. Experimental results complement the theoretical analysis and confirm the effectiveness of the control approach during on the road tests with three prototype vehicles also equipped with wireless communication hardware.