A systematic antiwindup strategy and the longitudinal control of a platoonof vehicles with control saturations

Current methodologies for designing control systems usually ignore the effe cts of control saturations. For vehicle platooning, this can be especially disastrous since the performance of a platoon of nonidentical vehicles is, in general, severely limited by saturating control signals. This paper pres ents a systematic design procedure for adapting a nominal controller, desig ned without regard to control saturation, to a higher performance nonlinear controller that explicitly accounts for the saturating nonlinearities whil e preserving stability. In particular, the error governor (EG) scheme propo sed by Kapasouris et al. [10] is extended and applied to the IVHS problem f ound in [13], This extension is a less conservative strategy that explicitl y accounts for an important class of controller designs, including proporti onal control and a class of nonlinear feedback designs. Results of the stud y demonstrate that severe windup found in nominal platooning applications c an systematically be eliminated without loss of steady-state performance. T his significantly increases the range of maneuvers open to the lead vehicle , thus enhancing the utility of a proposed design. An extensive simulation of a 15-car platoon of nonidentical vehicles with nonlinear vehicle models illustrates these results.