The topological variety significantly affects the platooning of multi-vehicle systems. This paper presents a distributed sliding mode control (SMC) method for vehicular platoons with positive definite topologies. The platoon model is assumed to be homogeneous with strict-feedback nonlinear node dynamics. The design of distributed SMC is divided into two parts, i.e., topological sliding surface design and topological reaching law design. In the former, the sliding surface is defined by weighted summation of individual error, while in the latter, a topologically structured reaching law is proposed to conform with the type of information flow exchange. The Lyapunov method is exploited to prove asymptotic stability of the multi-vehicle system. The effectiveness of this method is validated by numerical simulations.
['Yujia Wu', 'Shengbo Eben Li', 'Yang Zheng', 'J. Karl Hedrick']
Distributed sliding mode control for multi-vehicle systems with positive definite topologies