Event triggered cooperative trajectory coordination for platooning among heterogeneous vehicles

This article addresses the issue of achieving inter-vehicle cooperation for vehicles with heterogeneous dynamics. Inter-vehicle collaboration is achieved in the trajectory planning layer instead of the motion control layer to conquer the challenge led by dynamics mismatch. A novel sliding mode cooperative planning scheme is proposed based on a dynamically triggered distributed communication network. To ensure the practicality of the generated trajectories, both velocity constraints and input saturation phenomenon are considered for each vehicle. A reference filter is first designed to transform task information into smooth and trackable curves. The barrier Lyapunov function approach is then introduced to enhance the reachability of the trajectories by maintaining the difference between the planned trajectories and the actual trajectories. By proposing a new cooperative error, static and dynamic trigger schemes are developed for distributed vehicle communication. Comparative simulations regarding a ground–air multi-vehicle system are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our designs.