Delay-Aware Robust Control for Safe Autonomous Driving

June 2022

Delay-Aware Robust Control for Safe Autonomous Driving

Authors:

Dvij Kalaria, Qin Lin, and John M. Dolan

Abstract:

With the advancement of affordable self-driving vehicles using complicated nonlinear optimization but limited computation resources, computation time becomes a matter of concern. Other factors such as actuator dynamics and actuator command processing cost also unavoidably cause delays. In high-speed scenarios, these delays are critical to the safety of a vehicle. Recent works consider these delays individually, but none unifies them all in the context of autonomous driving. Moreover, recent works inappropriately consider computation time as a constant or a large upper bound, which makes the control either less responsive or over-conservative. To deal with all these delays, we present a unified framework by 1) modeling actuation dynamics, 2) using robust tube model predictive control, and 3) using a novel adaptive Kalman filter without assuming a known process model and noise covariance, which makes the controller safe while minimizing conservativeness. On the one hand, our approach can serve as a standalone controller; on the other hand, our approach provides a safety guard for a high-level controller, which assumes no delay. This can be used for compensating the sim-to-real gap when deploying a black-box learning-enabled controller trained in a simplistic environment without considering delays for practical vehicle systems.
@conference{Kalaria-2022-134784,
author = {Dvij Kalaria And Qin Lin And John M. Dolan},
title = {Delay-Aware Robust Control for Safe Autonomous Driving},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium (IV)},
year = {2022},
month = {June},
pages = {1565-1571},
keywords = {autonomous driving, delay, adaptive Kalman filter, safe control},
}
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