Decoupled H ∞ control of automated vehicular platoons with complex interaction topologies

The platooning of automated vehicles has potential to significantly benefit road traffic, while its robust performance is less investigated especially considering increasing complexity of interaction topologies. This study presents a decoupled H ∞ control method for automated vehicular platoon to comprehensively compromise multiple performances. The platoon control system is first decomposed into an uncertain part and a diagonal nominal system through the linear transformation, which is motivated by the eigenvalue decomposition of information topology. Based on this almost decoupled system, a distributed H ∞ controller is presented, which can balance the performances of robustness and disturbance attenuation ability. Moreover, a numerical method is given to solve and optimise this controller by using linear matrix inequality approach. Several comparative hardware‐in‐loop tests of different communication topologies and controllers have been carried out to demonstrate the effectiveness of this method.