Sliding Mode Control Strategy for Vehicle Platoons With Disturbance Observer

In order to ensure the stability of the system in finite time and avoid the collision of vehicles, a integral sliding mode control strategy (ISMC) combining with disturbance observer (DO) is presented in this paper. Firstly, the constant time headway (CTH) strategy is selected to improve the stability of the platoon. Every vehicle only receives the information of the neighboring vehicles in front of it, which avoids the information loss and delay. Then, disturbance is handled by disturbance observer which can well estimate external disturbance without knowing the disturbance boundary. Furthermore individual stability and string stability can be achieved by sliding mode controller and Laplace transform, respectively. In addition, an effective method is used to reduce chattering in sliding mode control. The string stability means error signal is not be amplified when propagating upstream the platoon. Finally, the simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed method.