No Arabic abstract
This paper studies the internal stability and string stability of a vehicle platooning of constant time headway spacing policy with a varying-speed leader using a multiple-predecessor-following strategy via vehicle-to-vehicle communication. Unlike the common case in which the leaders speed is constant and different kinds of Proportional-Integral-Derivative controllers are implemented, in this case, the fact that the leader has a time-varying speed necessitates the design of an observer. First, in order to estimate its position, speed and acceleration error with respect to the leader, each follower designs an observer. The observer is designed by means of constructing an observer matrix whose parameters should be determined. We simplifies the design of the matrix of the observer in such a way that the design boils down to choosing a scalar value. The resulting observer turns out to have a third order integrator dynamics, which provides an advantage of simplifying the controller structure and, hence, derive conditions for string stability using a frequency response method. A new heuristic searching algorithm is developed to deduce the controller parameter conditions, given a fixed time headway, for string stability. Additionally, a bisection-like algorithm is incorporated into the above algorithm to obtain the minimum (with some deviation tolerance) available value of the time headway by fixing one controller parameter. The effectiveness of the internal and string stabilities of the proposed observer-based controller is demonstrated via comparison examples.
Leader-follower tracking control design has received significant attention in recent years due to its important and wide applications. Considering a multi-agent system composed of a leader and multiple followers, this paper proposes and investigates a new perspective into this problem: can we enable a follower to estimate the leaders driving input and leverage this idea to develop new observer-based tracking control approaches? With this motivation, we develop an input-observer-based leader-follower tracking control framework, which features distributed input observers that allow a follower to locally estimate the leaders input toward enhancing tracking control. This work first studies the first-order tracking problem. It then extends to the more sophisticated case of second-order tracking and considers a challenging situation when the leaders and followers velocities are not measured. The proposed approaches exhibit interesting and useful advantages as revealed by a comparison with the literature. Convergence properties of the proposed approaches are rigorously analyzed. Simulation results further illustrate the efficacy of the proposed perspective, framework and approaches.
In this paper, a full-bridge boost power converter topology is studied for power factor control, using output high order sliding mode control. The AC/DC converters are used for charging the battery and super-capacitor in hybrid electric vehicles from the utility. The proposed control forces the input currents to track the desired values, which can controls the output voltage while keeping the power factor close to one. Super-twisting sliding mode observer is employed to estimate the input currents and load resistance only from the measurement of output voltage. Lyapunov analysis shows the asymptotic convergence of the closed loop system to zero. Simulation results show the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed controller.
This paper studies robust tracking control for a leader-follower multi-agent system (MAS) subject to disturbances. A challenging problem is considered here, which differs from those in the literature in two aspects. First, we consider the case when all the leader and follower agents are affected by disturbances, while the existing studies assume only the followers to suffer disturbances. Second, we assume the disturbances to be bounded only in rates of change rather than magnitude as in the literature. To address this new problem, we propose a novel observer-based distributed tracking control design. As a distinguishing feature, the followers can cooperatively estimate the disturbance affecting the leader to adjust their maneuvers accordingly, which is enabled by the design of the first-of-its-kind distributed disturbance observers. We build specific tracking control approaches for both first- and second-order MASs and prove that they can lead to bounded-error tracking, despite the challenges due to the relaxed assumptions about disturbances. We further perform simulation to validate the proposed approaches.
Networked robotic systems, such as connected vehicle platoons, can improve the safety and efficiency of transportation networks by allowing for high-speed coordination. To enable such coordination, these systems rely on networked communications. This can make them susceptible to cyber attacks. Though security methods such as encryption or specially designed network topologies can increase the difficulty of successfully executing such an attack, these techniques are unable to guarantee secure communication against an attacker. More troublingly, these security methods are unable to ensure that individual agents are able to detect attacks that alter the content of specific messages. To ensure resilient behavior under such attacks, this paper formulates a networked linear time-varying version of dynamic watermarking in which each agent generates and adds a private excitation to the input of its corresponding robotic subsystem. This paper demonstrates that such a method can enable each agent in a networked robotic system to detect cyber attacks. By altering measurements sent between vehicles, this paper illustrates that an attacker can create unstable behavior within a platoon. By utilizing the dynamic watermarking method proposed in this paper, the attack is detected, allowing the vehicles in the platoon to gracefully degrade to a non-communicative control strategy that maintains safety across a variety of scenarios.
We study how to design a secure observer-based distributed controller such that a group of vehicles can achieve accurate state estimates and formation control even if the measurements of a subset of vehicle sensors are compromised by a malicious attacker. We propose an architecture consisting of a resilient observer, an attack detector, and an observer-based distributed controller. The distributed detector is able to update three sets of vehicle sensors: the ones surely under attack, surely attack-free, and suspected to be under attack. The adaptive observer saturates the measurement innovation through a preset static or time-varying threshold, such that the potentially compromised measurements have limited influence on the estimation. Essential properties of the proposed architecture include: 1) The detector is fault-free, and the attacked and attack-free vehicle sensors can be identified in finite time; 2) The observer guarantees both real-time error bounds and asymptotic error bounds, with tighter bounds when more attacked or attack-free vehicle sensors are identified by the detector; 3) The distributed controller ensures closed-loop stability. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is evaluated through simulations by an application to vehicle platooning.