Optimal Control of Connected Automated Vehicles with Event-Triggered Control Barrier Functions: a Test Bed for Safe Optimal Merging

We address the problem of safely coordinating a network of Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAVs) in conflict areas of a traffic network. Such problems can be solved through a combination of tractable optimal control problems and Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) that guarantee the satisfaction of all constraints. These solutions can be reduced to a sequence of Quadratic Programs (QPs) which are efficiently solved online over discrete time steps. However, guaranteeing the feasibility of the CBF-based QP method within each discretized time interval requires the careful selection of time steps which need to be sufficiently small. This creates computational requirements and communication rates between agents which may limit the controller’s application to real CAVs. We tackle this limitation by adopting an event-triggered control approach for CAVs such that the next QP is triggered by properly defined events with a safety guarantee. We present a laboratory-scale test bed developed to emulate merging roadways using mobile robots as CAVs. We present results to demonstrate how the event-triggered scheme is computationally efficient and can handle measurement uncertainties and noise compared to time-driven control while guaranteeing safety.