Distributed Observer Design for Tracking Platoon of Connected and Autonomous Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper introduces a distributed observer for CAV platoons that estimates vehicle states using local communication, employing LMI techniques for gain design, and addresses network resilience through survivable design and redundancy.

Contribution

It presents a novel distributed observer design for CAV platoons using LMI-based gain synthesis and discusses resilience strategies for network failures.

Findings

Successful numerical validation of the distributed observer.

Effective state tracking in CAV platoons with network failure resilience.

Demonstrated the structure of observer error dynamics as a Kronecker product.

Abstract

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) aim to advance innovative strategies relating to different modes of transport, traffic management, and autonomous vehicles. This paper studies the platoon of connected and autonomous vehicles (CAV) and proposes a distributed observer to track the state of the CAV dynamics. First, we model the CAV dynamics via an LTI interconnected system. Then, a consensus-based strategy is proposed to infer the state of the CAV dynamics based on local information exchange over the communication network of vehicles. A linear-matrix-inequality (LMI) technique is adopted for the block-diagonal observer gain design such that this gain is associated in a distributed way and locally to every vehicle. The distributed observer error dynamics is then shown to follow the structure of the Kronecker matrix product of the system dynamics and the adjacency matrix of the CAV network. The notions of survivable network design and redundant observer scheme are further discussed in the paper to address resilience to link and node failure. Finally, we verify our theoretical contributions via numerical simulations.