Controller with Vehicular Communication Design for Vehicular Platoon System

Abstract

Tracked Electric Vehicles (TEV) which is a new mass-transport system. It aims to provide a safe, efficient and coordinated traffic system. In TEV, the inter-vehicular distance is reduced to only a quarter of the regular car length and where drive at 200km/h enabling mass transport at uniform speed. Under this requirement, the design of the controller is particularly important. This thesis first developed an innovative approach using adaptive Proportion, integral and derivation (PID) controller using fuzzy logic theory to keep variable time-gap between dynamic cars for platooning system with communication delay. The simulation results presented show a significant improvement in keeping time-gap variable between the cars enabling a safe and efficient flow of the platooning system. Secondly, this thesis investigates the use of Slide Mode Control (SMC) for TEV. It studies different V2V communication topology structures using graph theory and proposes a novel SMC design with and without global dynamic information. The Lyapunov candidate function was chosen to study the impact which forms an integral part for current and future research. The simulation results show that this novel SMC has a tolerance ability for communication delay. In order to present the real time TEV platoon system, a similar PI controller has been utilized in a novel automated vehicle, based on Raspberry Pi, multi-sensors and the designed Remote Control (RC) car. Thirdly, in order to obtain precise positioning information for vehicles in platoon system, this thesis describes Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)/Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) data fusion to achieve a highly precise positioning solution. The results show that the following vehicles can reach the same velocity and acceleration as the leading vehicle in 5 seconds and the spacing error is less than 0.1m. The practical results are in line with those from the simulated experiment.