Connectivity-Based Delay-Tolerant Control of Automated Vehicles: Theory and Experiments

The concept of utilizing vehicle-to-everything (V2X) connectivity to improve the resilience of automated vehicles in an environment where optical sensors may not provide reliable data is investigated. Longitudinal and lateral controllers are designed to enable a connected automated vehicle (CAV) to utilize V2X information from nearby connected human-driven vehicles (CHVs). The linear stability of the controllers are investigated theoretically while taking into account the time delays in the feedback loops. Novel performance measures are introduced to quantify the plant and string stability properties of the longitudinal controller from experimental data. The stability of the lateral controller is also evaluated in lane-keeping experiments. The robustness of the designed controllers against latency is demonstrated and the performance of the overall systems is showcased experimentally using real vehicles on a test track.