This paper investigates the vehicle platoon control problems with both velocity constraints and input saturation. Firstly, radial basis function neural networks are employed to approximate the unknown driving resistance of a vehicle’s dynamic model. Then, a bidirectional topology, where vehicles can only communicate with their direct preceding and following neighbors, is used to depict the relationship among the vehicles in the platoon. On this basis, a neural adaptive sliding-mode control algorithm with an anti-windup compensation technique is proposed to maintain the (...) vehicle platoon with desired distance. Moreover, the string stability and the strong string stability of the whole vehicle platoon are proven through the stability theorem. Finally, numerical simulations verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed control method. (shrink)

In nature, gregarious animals, insects, or bacteria usually exhibit paradoxical behaviors in the form of group fission and fusion, which exerts an important influence on group’s pattern formation, information transfer, and epidemiology. However, the fission-fusion dynamics have received little attention compared to other flocking behavior. In this paper, an intermittent selective interaction based control algorithm for the self-organized fission-fusion behavior of flocking system is proposed, which bridges the gap between the two conflicting behaviors in a unified fashion. Specifically, a hybrid (...) velocity coordination strategy that includes both the egalitarian and selective interactions is proposed, where the egalitarian interaction is to maintain the flock’s order and achieve the fusion behavior while the selective interaction strategy is for the response to external stimulus information and generates the fission behavior. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed control algorithm can realize the self-organized fission-fusion behavior of flocking system under a unified framework. The influences of the main control parameters on the performance of the fission-fusion behavior are also discussed. In particular, the trade-off parameterαbalances the exploration and exploitation behaviors of flocking system and significantly enhances its movement flexibility and environmental adaptivity. (shrink)

This paper investigates the nonlinear vehicle platoon control problems with external disturbances. The quadratic spacing policy is applied into the platoon control, in which the desired intervehicle distance is a quadratic function in terms of the vehicle’s velocities. Comparing with the general constant time headway policy, the QSP is more suitable to the human driving behaviors and can improve the traffic capacity. Then, a novel platoon control scheme is proposed based on the distributed integrated sliding mode. Since the external disturbances (...) are taken into consideration, the sliding mode method is employed to handle the disturbances. Moreover, the stability and string stability of the proposed platoon control system are strictly analyzed. In final, numerical simulations are provided to verify the proposed approaches. (shrink)