Distributed Motion Control Of Multi-vehicle Systems Under Complex Vehicle-communication-road Conditions

Intelligent and connected vehicles(ICV)integrate both the intelligent vehicles and connected vehicles technologies.By introducing vehicle-to-vehicle(V2V)communication,vehicles can form multi-vehicle systems to achieve cooperation in sensing,decision making,and control,which can effectively improve vehicles' performance.The cooperative control of multi-vehicle systems is influenced by connected vehicles,communication network,and driving roads.However,the existing studies(1)can hardly explicitly address vehicles' dynamics heterogeneity under general communication topologies,(2)can hardly realize optimal control under switching communication topologies,and(3)must rely on centralized decision-making in unsignalized intersection scenarios.To deal with these problems,this study takes multi-vehicle systems as the study object,and proposes:(1)a distributed control method that can explicitly deal with vehicles' dynamics heterogeneity,(2)a distributed predictive control method that can address switching communication topologies,and(3)a distributed cooperation method of multi-vehicle systems subject to unsignalized intersection constraints.The proposed methods provide a theoretical foundation and a methodological support for the distributed motion control of multi-vehicle systems under complex vehicle-communication-road conditions.First of all,a distributed control method of multi-vehicle systems is proposed to explicitly address vehicles' dynamics heterogeneity.For the directed acyclic graphs(DAGs)communication topologies,a similarity transformation is applied to the system based on the topological orderings.By exploiting a lower-triangular structure of the transformed system,the system structure is decomposed,and a necessary and sufficient condition for the internal stability is derived.Further,for the multiple-predecessor-following topologies,a necessary and sufficient condition is derived for the existence of feedback gains that guarantees string stability.This method solves the problem of explicitly addressing vehicles' dynamics heterogeneity under general communication topologies.Then a distributed predictive control method of multi-vehicle systems is proposed to account for switching communication topologies.Within the framework of distributed model predictive control,a distributed optimization problem is formulated regarding switching neighbor sets.By exploiting the properties of DAGs,a sufficient condition is derived for the convergence of the predicted terminal states to the desired equilibrium states.To address the switching of communication topologies,a Lyapunov candidate function regarding the union of neighbor sets is proposed,with which a sufficient condition regarding the weight coefficients of the inequality constraint and cost function is derived to guarantee the asymptotic internal stability of the closed-loop system.This method solves the problem of optimization-based control of multi-vehicle systems under switching communication topologies.Next,a distributed cooperation method is proposed for multi-vehicle systems subject to unsignalized intersection constraints.With the focus on typical scenarios of unsignalized intersections,an area-partition cooperation framework is proposed for multi-vehicle systems.Within this framework,an intersection area is partitioned into an observation zone,an optimization zone,and a control zone,for which,a distributed vehicle-state observation algorithm,a distributed arriving-time optimization algorithm,and a distributed trajectory-tracking control algorithm are proposed,respectively.The convergence of these algorithms is proved and the settling times are derived.This method achieves the distributed decision and control of multi-vehicle systems subject to unsignalized intersection constraints.Finally,a simulation platform and an experimental platform are built to carry out simulation tests on the cooperation method for unsignalized intersections and experimental verification on the heterogeneous platoon control method.Test results demonstrate that the proposed methods can achieve cooperative passing of vehicles at unsignalized intersections and stable platooning of heterogeneous vehicles.