State-Estimation-Based Control Strategy Design for Connected Cruise Control With Delays

Abstract

The research on connected and automated vehicles attracts much attention recently. In connected vehicle systems, connected cruise control (CCC) is a wildly concerned technique to improve traffic safety and mitigate congestion. In this article, an optimal state-estimation-based (SE-based) control algorithm is proposed in a backward recursion manner to regulate CCC vehicle's longitudinal motion under stochastic communication delays, state noises, and channel interferences. Based on the analysis of error dynamics of vehicles and optimal state estimation strategy, the SE-based system dynamics is first formulated by using the Kalman filtering method. Then, a two-step SE-based control algorithm aiming at minimizing the quadratic system cost is proposed to enhance the vehicular platoon stability. In particular, the optimal control strategy can be generated online as a linear function of the estimated state information and previous control signals, and the corresponding coefficient can be iteratively calculated in an offline step. Finally, the results are successfully extended to the case of arbitrary communication delays, and the condition for the asymptotically mean square stability of the proposed optimal SE-based CCC algorithm is derived. Simulation results indicate that the proposed SE-based control algorithm has better system performance and control stability compared with existing works.