Distributed Event-Triggered Control of Vehicular Networked System with Bursty Packet Drops

This paper investigates the distributed event-triggered control of leader-follower consensus problem with harsh environmental conditions such as a high probability of burst packet drops occurs in the communication channels between the vehicles. The main objective in the vehicular platoons is to ensure that all follower vehicles are traveling at the same speed as the leader while maintaining a desired inter-vehicular distance with considering the minimum communication resource usage. To achieve the object, a novel distributed event-triggered communication strategy based on the estimation and prediction of self-states and other agents’ states in each vehicle is proposed which includes two parallel algorithms. The first one is based on comparing the state estimation and prediction of the vehicle itself, and the second one is based on comparing the state estimation and prediction of other vehicles which have interaction in their process with the active vehicle. Collision avoidance, speed convergence, and limited communication resource usage of each vehicle are simultaneously considered in the design of the event-triggered mechanism in a harsh packet drops environment. Numerical simulations are presented to show that the proposed event triggering algorithm under three scenarios of burst packet drops can converge the consensus problem of vehicular platooning.