Autonomous Multi-vehicle Consensus for High-order Systems

Multi-vehicle deployment can be formulated as a cooperation formation problem using the weighted consensus method. Our objectives are that make adjacent vehicles keep the constant spacing and all vehicles approach the common velocity and acceleration. Moreover, it is preferred that vehicle platoon has fast convergence and strong robustness when disturbances occur. To achieve these goals, the third-order dynamics are established for vehicle platoon that are regarded as connected vehicle systems (CVSs) and distributed control protocols are designed to implement cooperation control. The paper focuses on analysis of stability and stability margin for the CVSs. The sufficient and necessary conditions on stability of the CVSs are achieved using the algebraic graph theory and the Routh-Hurwitz stability criterion. Further the sufficient conditions, which are determined by the controller gains and the model parameter, but are independent on eigenvalues of the Laplacian matrix of the corresponding network topology, are obtained. To characterize convergent speed of CVSs, the conditions on stability margin of CVSs are also derived. Simulations are shown to verify validation of the results.