Switched Pinning Control for Merging and Splitting Maneuvers of Vehicle Platoons

This paper considers a velocity control problem for merging and splitting maneuvers of vehicle platoons. In this paper, an external device sends velocity commands to some vehicles in the platoon, and the others adjust their velocities autonomously. The former is pinning control, and the latter is consensus control in multi-agent control. We propose a switched pinning control algorithm. Our algorithm consists of three submethods. The first is an optimal switching method of pinning agents based on an MLD (Mixed Logical Dynamical) system model and MPC (Model Predictive Control). The second is a representation method for dynamical platoon formation with merging and splitting maneuver. The platoon formation follows the positional relation between vehicles or the formation demand from the external device. The third is a switching reduction method by setting a cost function that penalizes the switching of the pinning agents in the steady-state. Our proposed algorithm enables us to improve the consensus speed. Moreover, our algorithm can regroup the platoons to the arbitrary platoons and control the velocities of the multiple vehicle platoons to each target value.