State-sensitive event-triggered path following control of autonomous ground vehicles

This paper investigates an improved event-triggered control based on the perception of state measurement for path following control of autonomous ground vehicles. Firstly, in order to regulate the event-triggered thresholds dynamically, a barrier-like function is first used to develop such a novel state-sensitive event-triggered communication (SS-ETC) scheme. Different from the existing variable-threshold ETC schemes, the proposed SS-ETC incorporates the state measurements directly in the event threshold adjustment, eliminating the need for additional terms or dynamics introduced in previous works. Secondly, the networked path following control modeling issues, which include both physical dynamics and the SS-ETC scheme, are characterized by the input delay approach. The controller design method is well derived, ensuring the preservation of input-to-state stability of the path following control system. The main advantage of this paper lies in the proposed SS-ETC, which shows a better trade-off between control and communication. Finally, several simulation experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed event-triggered control scheme.