Abstract: The distributed adaptive control problem of vehicular platoon is considered. The vehicle longitudinal dynamics is modeled by a second-order nonlinear model with uncertain parameters. And the directed graph is used to describe the relationship of information transmission between vehicles. By utilizing dynamic gain technique, a distributed adaptive controller independent of the global platoon information is proposed. Moreover, when the split/join maneuver happens, it is shown that the control objective can be reached without redesigning the distributed controller as long as the interaction graph contains a directed spanning tree with the leading vehicle as the root. The numerical simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control law.

Key words: vehicular platoon, distributed control, adaptive control, dynamic gain technique, parameter uncertainties