A Fixed-Time Multi-Platoon Maneuvers with Actuator Saturation and Faults

This paper investigates the merging and splitting maneuvers of multiple heterogeneous platoons in the presence of actuator saturation and faults. At first, the vehicles of interest are divided into separate platoons, where vehicles within each platoon synchronize within themselves. However, vehicles belonging to different platoons follow distinct target trajectories. Subsequently, a decentralized adaptive fixed-time control law is formulated to estimate the unknown faults and to compensate the impact of actuator saturation. In the proposed network, the communication exchange among vehicles of different platoons uses matrices that encode the orientation of the new platoon with respect to the other one. This makes it suitable for achieving consensus when tackling a large variety of vehicle formations. The control law guarantees that multi-leader platooning achieves fixed-time convergence even in the presence of actuator saturation, faults and external disturbances. The effectiveness of this proposed approach is demonstrated through numerical simulations.