Fast terminal sliding mode control for cooperative braking of the vehicle platoon

The cooperative braking has the potential of significantly enhancing vehicle platoon economy, safety and traffic capacity. The main target of the cooperative braking is to ensure interconnected vehicles keep within the safe spacing range and stop at the desired target stopping positions smoothly, accurately. In order to achieve above-mentioned goals, this paper proposes a novel fast terminal sliding mode controller for cooperative braking of vehicle platoon with consideration on unknown dynamics. Firstly, the longitudinal vehicle dynamics model is presented. Then, for the purpose of achieving finite-time consensus of the cooperative braking of vehicle platoon, a prescribed position braking policy with safety gap constraints is adopted to avoid serial rear-end collisions and a novel distributed fast terminal sliding mode control strategy is adopted to speed up the convergence of the cooperative braking controller and eliminate the influences of unknown dynamics . Finally, the simulation results are demonstrated to validate our controller and cooperative braking policy.