A novel platoon topology and performance analysis with cloud brain control center for multi-functional unmanned ground vehicle

Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) are of great significance to the development of Intelligent Transportation System (ITS). The UGVs are supposed to serve a large number of missions with multiple functions in civilian use. Therefore, it requires UGV to be grouped as a platoon to complete the given missions. A novel platoon topology, Vehicle-Cloud Bidirectional Leader (VCBDL), is proposed in this paper to provide the basement for the group control of multi-functional UGVs. The VCBDL topology takes consideration of a cloud brain control center, which is capable of analyzing and making autonomous decisions for the UGVs. In order to realize the stable operation of the platoon with VCBDL topology, this paper analyzes the design of the platoon controller based on the graph theory method and obtains the range of controller gain. The robustness of the running platoon is analyzed and the convergence range of the platoon robustness index is defined. The above conclusions are verified by simulation based on the control of the police-used patrol UGV. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of controller design, and the robustness performance is investigated by simulated random platoon disturbance. In addition, the experiments with real shuttle UGVs testbeds platoon are performed to verify the performance of the proposed controller.