Longitudinal Control of Vehicle Platoon Based on Sliding Mode Algorithm

The coordinate control problem of vehicle platoon is studied with the sliding mode control (SMC) method in this paper. Starting from the inter-vehicle safety distance, a longitudinal controller for vehicle platoon is developed to improve the stability by incorporating information on the positions, inter-vehicle distance, speed, and acceleration of the current and preceding vehicles. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is verified through joint simulation with Carsim and MATLAB/Simulink. Simulation results demonstrate that the problem of excessively large safety distance is resolved and the stability of vehicle platooning system is also improved with the proposed controller.