Event-triggered cooperative control of connected vehicle platoons with distributed unbounded communication delays and unknown external disturbances

This paper addresses the cooperative control of a platoon of leader-following connected vehicles under an observer-based event-triggered control strategy, incorporating distributed unbounded communication delays and unknown external disturbances. Given the unavailability or limitations of direct access to the internal states and external disturbances, an extended state observer is designed to reconstruct the system states. This observer employs the relative outputs of neighboring vehicles to estimate the states of the follower vehicles and the external disturbances simultaneously. Based on these estimations, an event-triggered platoon control scheme in the presence of distributed unbounded communication delays is introduced, which can prevent continuous updates of controller. This scheme ensures the achievement of the platoon control objective while excluding Zeno-behavior in the event-triggering sequence. Finally, theoretical analysis is effectively supported via a simulation example.