Decentralized spacing control with communication delay: a state space modeling based design approach

Abstract

Spacing control is important topics of research as increasing number of vehicle are automatically controlled in land, space and under water. Spacing control has importance as it helps in safety of passengers and also saves time and fuel. It has application in many fields like aircraft flight formation vehicle platooning, spacecraft, etc. A platoon is group of vehicles travelling with a leader which is followed by the others. Information of the leader is very important in case of platoon to be safe. Vehicles are equipped with wireless communication which is used in sending and receiving information from the other vehicle and specially leader information. These communication systems are not always prefect, sometime or frequently it gets affected by environmental factors and is not able to send and receive information. The need of robust control law to minimize the distance between vehicles and that remains robust in uncertain conditions is important. In this research Switched Static Output Feedback Stabilization with LMI approach has been used. This method has advantages over earlier method that has limitation over switching sequence. Using SOF method gives us a simple control methodology that doesn’t need state information and LMI method is reliable in finding stability condition. It results in a control method that will stabilize the system in any arbitrary switching. System will attain string stability as it will ensure that error between vehicles doesn’t increases as we go down the platoon [1].