Improving the Communication Overhead in Vehicles Platoon: A Novel Dynamic Event-Triggered Predictor Method

The paper introduces a novel distributed digital predictor-feedback control combined with a dynamic event-triggered mechanism to solve the platoon formation control problem of autonomous connected vehicles undergoing large actuation delays. Due to the limited communication bandwidth, they make the control over the communication network significantly prone to hazard events during the co-operative driving. The approach achieves a twofold benefit: i) easier implementation in digital platform provided by its own sampled-data structure; ii) significant reduction of the computational/communication resources over the network by means of an event-based mechanism. The predictive control scheme modifies the classical model reduction approach in a fully distributed way so to take into account the vehicles non-linearities, even though completely unknown. The exponential stability of the vehicular network is established by means of the Lyapunov-Krasovskii method, with derived stability conditions in the form of linear matrix inequality. Hardware-In-the-Loop validations confirm the theoretical findings.