Resilient adaptive sliding mode control for a platoon of nonlinear connected vehicles with actuator attacks

Actuators, such as braking and steering devices, are the final components of the automotive electronic control system, which serve a vital function in safeguarding the security of connected vehicles (CVs). However, actuators lack security guarantees against hostile attacks. To counter this risk, this article aims to seek a control-theoretic solution against actuator attacks in the platoon system. First, an improved spacing error strategy is employed to mitigate the detrimental influence caused by non-zero initial spacing errors within the platoon system. Second, a novel sliding mode surface featuring the state-dependent variable exponent coefficient is designed to enhance the convergence performance. Moreover, a coupled sliding mode surface is introduced under the predecessor-following (PF) topology. Third, several adaptive schemes are proposed for unknown vehicular parameters and a resilient adaptive sliding mode control (RASMC) law with the fixed-time convergence is developed for a platoon of nonlinear CVs. The results indicate that fixed-time guarantees can be achieved for both individual vehicle stability and string stability of the platoon, despite actuator attacks, uncertain parameters, and external uncertainties. Finally, experimental simulations are conducted to validate the performance of the designed methodology.