Robust Event-Triggered Control of Vehicle Platoons Using Multiple Triggering Mechanisms

Abstract

This paper presents a robust control framework for vehicle platoons utilizing multiple independent event-triggering mechanisms (ETMs). To reduce communication overhead, independent ETMs are deployed in both the sensor-to-controller (S2C) and controller-to-actuator (C2A) channels. Each vehicle measures its own acceleration and velocity, as well as the relative velocity and position with respect to the preceding vehicle, with separate ETMs assigned to different sensor signals based on their characteristics. To mitigate the impacts of system uncertainties and sampling errors, a backstepping-based controller is developed by incorporating both a robustifying term and a disturbance compensation term. For each event-triggered signal, a robust estimator is designed to generate continuous and differentiable estimates, thereby suppressing inter-event errors and enabling the seamless implementation of the backstepping control law. Since all ETMs operate independently, the proposed framework provides enhanced flexibility in communication scheduling. Theoretical performance are shown and simulation studies are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach.