Event-Triggered Parallel Control Using Deep Reinforcement Learning With Application to Comfortable Autonomous Driving

A novel event-triggered control (ETC) method, called deep event-triggered parallel control (deep-ETPC), is presented to achieve path tracking for comfortable autonomous driving (CAD) using parallel control and deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG). Based on parallel control, the developed deep-ETPC method constructs a dynamic control policy by introducing variation rates of controls. By employing variation rates of controls, the developed deep-ETPC method is capable of indicating communication loss and comfortable driving indices in the reward, and then enables reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn comfortable ETC driving policies directly. Moreover, the communication loss, which reflects ETC, is integrated into the reward, so there is no need to additionally design/train triggering conditions, which can be considered a type of multi-tasking learning. Furthermore, an ETPC-oriented DDPG algorithm is developed to achieve the developed deep-ETPC method, making DDPG applicable to ETC. Empirical results, including tracking a simple straight line trajectory and a complicated sinusoidal trajectory, demonstrate the effectiveness of the developed deep-ETPC method.