Distributed Receding Horizon Control of Connected Automated Vehicles with Discontinuous-gear Transmission

Connected automated vehicles (CAVs) have the potential to significantly benefit the road transportation. This paper presents a distributed control algorithm for a platoon of CAVs with discontinuous gear transmissions using the receding horizon optimization. A directed graph is used to describe the underlying communication topology among vehicles. Each vehicle is modeled as a third-order nonlinear system with mixed integer inputs. To achieve the coordination of multiple CAVs, each vehicle is assigned a local open-loop optimal control problem only relying on the information of neighboring nodes, where the cost function is designed by penalizing on both tracking errors and fuel consumption. In addition, an equality based terminal constraint is employed to guarantee the consensus of desired terminal state in the predictive horizon, which is critical for the asymptotical stability of overall platoon. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed method has the potential to achieve the coordination of multi-vehicles in a platoon while improving fuel efficiency.