A New Quadratic Spacing Policy and Adaptive Fault-Tolerant Platooning With Actuator Saturation

This article investigates a fault-tolerant control problem for heterogeneous vehicular platoons with actuator faults and saturation. The occurrence of actuator faults may yield large control signals to avoid performance loss, which can potentially lead to saturation of the actuator that may cause further performance deterioration or even instability. To compensate for the effects of actuator faults and saturation, an adaptive fault-tolerant control method is proposed based on nonlinear vehicle dynamics and a new quadratic spacing policy. The improved quadratic spacing policy is introduced to remove the assumption of zero initial spacing errors. The nonlinear vehicle dynamics is approximated by a radial basis function neural network (RBFNN). The adaptive fault-tolerant platoon control method is developed in the context of PID-type sliding mode control technique, and proved to be capable of guaranteeing individual vehicle stability, string stability and traffic flow stability. The effectiveness of the method is verified through comparison simulation studies.