Finite Time Sliding Mode Control of Connected Vehicle Platoons Guaranteeing String Stability

We consider the control design problem for a connected vehicle platoon. It is known that the platooning of vehicles in highways brings several advantages such as reduction of air pollution, increase of safety and facilitating the traffic flow. So, in this paper, a fast control algorithm is proposed to enhance the stability convergence rate of smart platoons. Subsequently, a robust terminal sliding mode controller is derived so that to not only guarantee the finite time fast stability of the connected vehicles, but also to ensure that the global string stability of the platoon is achieved via defining a new spacing error variable. The proposed sliding mode controller gets benefits of a non-singular switching sliding manifold to result in an exact finite time sliding motion dynamics. Considering the effects of uncertainties in the vehicle model as well as time varying external perturbations (such as the effects of wind, snow, etc) affecting the vehicle dynamics, a second-order nonlinear model is adopted for the vehicles and the robustness of the proposed control algorithm is theoretically proved using Lyapunov theory. At last, computer simulations illustrate the effective and fast performance of the introduced platooning strategy.