A Deep Time Delay Filter for Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control

Cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) is a smart transportation solution to alleviate traffic congestion and enhance road safety. The performance of CACC systems can be remarkably affected by communication time delays, and traditional control methods often compromise control performance by adjusting control gains to maintain system stability. In this paper, we present a study on the stability of a CACC system in the presence of time delays and highlight the trade-off between control performance and tuning controller gains to address increasing delays. We propose a novel approach incorporating a neural network module called the deep time delay filter (DTDF) to overcome this limitation. The DTDF leverages the assumption that time delays primarily originate from the communication layer of the CACC network, which can be subject to adversarial delays of varying magnitudes. By considering time-delayed versions of the car states and predicting the present (un-delayed) states, the DTDF compensates for the effects of communication delays. The proposed approach combines classical control techniques with machine learning, offering a hybrid control system that excels in explainability and robustness to unknown parameters. We conduct comprehensive experiments using various deep-learning architectures to train and evaluate the DTDF models. Our experiments utilize a robot platform consisting of MATLAB, Simulink, the Optitrack motion capture system, and the Qbot2e robots. Through these experiments, we demonstrate that when appropriately trained, our system can effectively mitigate the adverse effects of constant time delays and outperforms a traditional CACC baseline in control performance. This experimental comparison, to the best of the author’s knowledge, is the first of its kind in the context of a hybrid machine learning CACC system. We thoroughly explore initial conditions and range policy parameters to evaluate our system under various experimental scenarios. By providing detailed insights and experimental results, we aim to contribute to the advancement of CACC research and highlight the potential of hybrid machine learning approaches in improving the performance and reliability of CACC systems.