Dynamics control of topology switching for multi-functional unmanned ground vehicle platoon with VCBDL topology

With the development of Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs), a variety of civilian missions could be carried out by UGVs. The utilization of UGV in Intelligent Transportation System (ITS) has received significant attention in recent year. However, single UGV can’t satisfy the requirement of enormous complex work in civil use. It requires UGV to be grouped as a platoon to complete different mission with different formation and information topology. Therefore, a novel coordination control method is needed to solve the topology switch problem. In this paper, a switchable form of Vehicle-Cloud Bidirectional Leader (VCBDL) topology is proposed. Within this information topology, the formation topology of UGV platoon is formed by following the order of cloud brain and can be switched for different requirement. To obtain stable performance of the platoon in switch process, this paper analyzes the design of the platoon controller. The range of controller gain is obtained through the Lyapunov stability analysis. The above conclusions are verified by the experiments based on a shuttle UGV testbed platoon.