'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Abstract
This paper proposes a distributed control scheme
for a platoon of heterogeneous vehicles based on the mechanism
of model predictive control (MPC). The platoon composes of a
group of vehicles interacting with each other via inter-vehicular
spacing constraints, to avoid collision and reduce communication
latency, and aims to make multiple vehicles driving on the same
lane safely with a close range and the same velocity. Each
vehicle is subject to both state constraints and input constraints,
communicates only with neighboring vehicles, and may not know
a priori desired setpoint. We divide the computation of control
inputs into several local optimization problems based on each
vehicle’s local information. To compute the control input of
each vehicle based on local information, a distributed computing
method must be adopted and thus the coupled constraint is
required to be decoupled. This is achieved by introducing the
reference state trajectories from neighboring vehicles for each
vehicle and by employing the interactive structure of computing
local problems of vehicles with odd indices and even indices. It
is shown that the feasibility of MPC optimization problems is
achieved at all time steps based on tailored terminal inequality
constraints, and the asymptotic stability of each vehicle to the
desired trajectory is guaranteed even under a single iteration
between vehicles at each time. Finally, a comparison simulation
is conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed
distributed MPC method for heterogeneous vehicle control with
respect to normal and extreme scenarios