Distributed Leader-Tracking for Autonomous Connected Vehicles in Presence of Input Time-Varying Delay

In this paper, the leader tracking problem for a platoon of connected vehicles in presence of homogeneous time-varying Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication delays is addressed. To this aim, the platoon is recast as a network of multiagent systems and consensus is achieved by leveraging a delayed distributed strategy that complements the standard linear diffusive control protocol with additional distributed integral and derivative actions. The asymptotic stability of the closed-loop delayed system is hence analytically proven by exploiting the Lyapunov-Krasovskii theory. Stability conditions are expressed as a set of Linear Matrix Inequalities, whose solution allows the proper tuning of proportional, derivative and integral gains such as to counteract the presence of the time-varying input delay. An exemplar tracking maneuver is considered for evaluating the performance of a connected vehicles fleet and the numerical results confirm the effectiveness of the theoretical derivation.