Design of decentralized adaptive controllers for a class of interconnected nonlinear dynamical systems

The authors consider a class of interconnected nonlinear dynamical systems suggested by the problem of longitudinal control of a platoon of vehicles on a lane of a highway. After describing the physical setting from which the control problem arises they propose a decentralized adaptive control scheme for this class of system. They establish that the proposed adaptive control scheme is suitable for monotonically decreasing the bound on the magnitude of deviations of each dynamical system´s state from its sink manifold provided that the exogenous input is varying sufficiently slowly and the state-observer error is sufficiently small. An important feature of this adaptive control scheme is that these deviations are bounded independently of the parameter errors