Distributed Robust MPC Based Lateral Control of Vehicle Platoons

The lateral control of vehicle platoons, which ensures that the vehicle can follow its leader in lane change and turn scenarios, is important in practice. This paper studies lateral control of vehicle platoons under external disturbance and communication delay. A lateral dynamic characteristics model of vehicle platoons based on path-following strategy is established. Then the distributed robust model predictive control strategy is adopted, where the minimum robust positive invariant set is used to characterize the influence of the external disturbance on the actual system state and the model predictive method is employed to control the nominal system. In order to ensure the lateral disturbance string stability of vehicle platoons, a condition of model predictive controller is provided. Simulation results in different steering scenarios demonstrate the merits of the proposed method.