Distributed Platoon Control of Connected Vehicles Based on Input-to-state String Stability

In this paper, we propose a platoon controller design approach for the vehicular platoon with bounded external disturbances. The vehicle communication between followers are bidirectional, and the leader can transmit its state to all followers. To make sure the platoon can converge to the leader's state with external disturbances, a distributed discontinuous controller is proposed. By introducing input-to-state string stability (ISSS), the states of all followers are proved to be convergent under the leader's bounded inputs and each follower's bounded external disturbances. After solving the linear matrix inequality (LMI) obtained from the convergence analysis, we get the feedback control gains which can make the vehicle platoon stabilized. Besides, with some minor changes to the theorem, the controller can also apply to the platoon system without disturbances. Finally, the effectiveness of the control scheme is confirmed by some numerical simulations.