Longitudinal control of automated CHVs with significant actuator delays

One of the most critical obstacles in the automated operation of commercial heavy vehicles (CHVs) is the presence of significant delays in the fuel and brake actuators. These delays are especially important in longitudinal control of vehicle platoons that do not employ intervehicle communication, because their effect becomes cumulative as it propagates upstream, resulting in considerably degraded performance. Our objective in this paper is to design autonomous controllers which, in the presence of large delays, recover the good performance achieved when the delays are negligible. We propose two different approaches which are tailored to different performance requirements and computational resources. A backstepping-based nonlinear scheme with prediction almost recovers the original "delay-free" performance at the cost of additional controller complexity, while a simpler PID-based nonlinear scheme yields nearly as good performance.