Backstepping method based controller design for third-order truck platoon robust to dynamic uncertainty and external disturbance

The vehicle platoon is subject to dynamic uncertainty and external disturbance, such as air drag and parameter variation in practice, so lack of consideration for those factors can deteriorate control performance. This paper proposes a nonlinear control algorithm based on a novel adaptive backstepping method to cope with the uncertainty and disturbance. The virtual controller in the backstepping method utilizes only the local information of the individual vehicle, rather than the global state information, in the control algorithm design. A third-order vehicle dynamics model was built to incorporate the nonlinearity and the factor of actuation delay. The fuzzy logic system (FLS) is applied to estimate the nonlinearity in vehicle dynamics to facilitate the adaptive control. Five scenarios with different settings were constructed to verify the control performance in the simulation, which indicates the effectiveness and robustness of the controller to dynamic uncertainty and external disturbance.