Adaptive Platooning Control of Connected Heterogeneous Vehicles With Actuator Nonlinearities and Spacing Constraints

Vehicle platoon systems (VPSs) constitute a fundamental component of intelligent transportation systems (ITSs), enhancing traffic efficiency, safety, and energy conservation. This paper presents an adaptive control strategy for unknown non-linear heterogeneous VPSs under a bidirectional communication topology. The proposed approach simultaneously addresses asymmetric spacing constraints, actuator saturation, and dead-zone nonlinearities. First, an equivalent transformation is adopted to eliminate the need for precise modeling of both system dynamics and actuator nonlinearities. An adaptive mechanism is then designed to jointly estimate the bounds of approximation errors, the norm of ideal NN weights, and the derivative bounds of control inputs. Based on both the estimated bounds and the gap about the time-headway policy, a novel controller is constructed to enhance safety and vehicle stability. Furthermore, a barrier Lyapunov function (BLF) is incorporated to rigorously enforce inter-vehicle spacing constraints, thereby ensuring collision avoidance. The proposed control scheme is theoretically proven and numerically validated to guarantee both individual vehicle stability and string stability of the platoon.