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14th Southern California Nonlinear Control Workshop
Decentralized Control of Vehicular Platoons: Improving Closed-loop Stability by Mistuning
Prabir Barooah, UCSB
Advisor: João P. Hespanha
Advisor: João P. Hespanha
We
consider decentralized control of a platoon of N identical vehicles
moving in a straight line. The control objective is for each vehicle to
maintain a constant inter-vehicular separation using only the local
information from itself and its two nearest neighbors. If every vehicle
uses the same controller, we show that the least stable closed-loop
eigenvalue approaches zero as O(1/N^2). We then show how to ameliorate
this loss of stability by small amounts, i.e., changing the controller
gains from their nominal values. We prove that with arbitrary small
amounts of mistuning, the asymptotic behavior of the least stable
closed loop eigenvalue can be improved to O(1/N).