Asynchronous Platoon Control for Connected Vehicles With Intermittent and Delayed Information Transmission

This technical note investigates the asynchronous platoon control problem for connected vehicles with intermittent and delayed information transmission under dynamically changing communication topologies. An asynchronous consensus-based protocol is proposed for each vehicle based on the state information of its neighbors at discrete times with communication delays, in which the asynchrony means that each agent updates its dynamics at discrete time instants determined by its own clock. The update intervals and the communication delays are allowed to be arbitrary bounded. We employ nonnegative matrix theory and graph theory to prove that the vehicle platoon asymptotically reaches a desired intervehicle spacing and a common velocity, if the effective communication topology jointly contains a directed spanning tree. Furthermore, we show that the string stability of the platoon control system is attained under the predecessor-following topology. Finally, we present numerical examples to validate the theoretical results.