Aperiodic Consensus Control for Tracking Nonlinear Trajectories of a Platoon of Vehicles

This article presents an aperiodic control solution for the remote guidance of a convoy of intelligent vehicles tracking nonlinear trajectories. To accomplish this, it is assumed that the longitudinal and lateral stability problems are decoupled. A centralized self-triggered consensus controller ensures convoy stability, thus maintaining the desired distance between vehicles while also achieving a significant reduction in the number of times the channel is accessed. In addition, a decentralized self-triggered controller is designed for each follower to track nonlinear trajectories. With this self-triggered approach, each vehicle monitors its own state only at precise instants. The main contribution of this proposal is to reduce the wireless channel load while preserving the tracking performance of the convoy.