Adaptive fixed-time prescribed performance control of vehicular platoons with unknown dead-zone and actuator saturation

This article focuses on the problem of fixed-time prescribed performance platoon control for heterogeneous vehicles with unknown dead-zone and actuator saturation. First, an equivalent transformation is developed to approximate the actuator nonlinearity (i.e., dead-zone and saturation), which reduces the complexity of controller design. Then, to guarantee the tracking errors converge to the predetermined region in the given time, a modified prescribed performance function is presented. Based on this, a novel adaptive sliding mode control scheme is developed in the context of fixed-time theory, which is proved to be capable of ensuring individual vehicle stability and string stability in fixed time. In addition, under the proposed control scheme, the convergence time is independent of initial conditions of the system. Finally, numerical simulations are carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.