Robust prescribed performance-based control of autonomous tractor-trailers convoy with limited communication range

This paper investigates the problem of a nonlinear platoon controller design for a group of autonomous tractor-trailers with limited communication ranges in order to increase the load transportation capacity. The main control objective is to force each consecutive pair of tractor-trailers to follow each other in a convoy-like formation based on their posture and velocity measurements in the presence of unmodelled dynamics and external disturbances. The prescribed performance strategy is effectively applied to the relative range and angle between each successive pair in the group to preserve their connectivity without any possible collision by defining some preassigned performance characteristics on the transient and steady-state responses. A high-gain observer, an adaptive robust controller and a three-layer neural network are heuristically utilised to develop an efficient robust output-feedback platoon controller as well. The stability of the entire state-feedback and output-feedback control system is investigated by the Lyapunov stability method and some numerical simulations are presented to validate the controller efficiency in an autonomous transportation application.