SAFE: Switched Adaptive Formation via Event-Triggered Control for Multi-Vehicle Systems

Abstract

This paper presents an adaptive hybrid event-triggered switched formation control strategy for the multi-vehicle systems containing autonomous vehicles (AVs) to address uncertainties in both longitudinal and lateral dynamics. The proposed framework enables safe and efficient maneuvering of AV formations in complex traffic scenarios, such as navigating narrow road segments and performing cooperative obstacle avoidance. Unlike conventional platoon control strategies that depend on fixed communication topologies and continuous state updates, the proposed approach employs a sampling-based observer to accurately reconstruct vehicle dynamics under limited communication. An adaptive backstepping-based controller is then developed, integrated with a hybrid event-triggered control (ETC) mechanism that combines fixed-threshold and self-triggering conditions to achieve an improved trade-off between formation tracking performance and control efficiency, thereby reducing unnecessary control updates. A Lyapunov-based stability analysis rigorously guarantees bounded tracking errors and excludes Zeno behavior. Simulation results on switched vehicular formations validate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy, demonstrating significant improvements in safety, stability, and overall mobility.