Motion control of connected and automated vehicles in a lane‐changing scenario with guaranteed tracking performance

The coupled, nonlinear vehicle dynamics and multi-vehicle cooperative strategies make the lane-changing maneuver control of vehicle platoons a challenging task. This paper presents the dynamic modeling and motion control of connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) for lane-changing maneuver, utilizing the ideology of constraint-following servo control. To guarantee a transient and steady tracking performance, a series of equality constraints and bilateral inequality constraints bounded by decaying functions or scalar constants are imposed on the dynamic state to formulate a constrained dynamical system. Since the original Udwadia-Kalaba (UK) approach cannot handle inequality constraints and underactuated systems, a creative diffeomorphism method is applied to transform the bounded state into an unbounded one. Then, based on the UK approach and Lyapunov stability theory, a novel constraint-following controller is designed to render the transformed states asymptotically stable in a full actuated system, and to achieve uniform stability performance in an underactuated system. Finally, numerical simulations are used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control methodology.