Delay-Aware Robust Control for Safe Autonomous Driving and Racing

Delays endanger the safety of autonomous systems functioning in the rapidly changing environments of autonomous driving and high-speed racing. Unfortunately, the consideration of delays is often overlooked during controller design or learning-enabled controller training phases prior to deployment in the physical world. This paper systematically and comprehensively addresses both the computation delay arising from nonlinear optimization for control and other inevitable delays caused by actuators. First, we propose a new filtering approach to adaptively estimate the time-variant computation delay. Second, we model actuation dynamics for steering delay. Third, all the constrained optimization is realized in a robust tube model predictive controller. In terms of application merits, our approach is a novel design for a standalone delay-aware controller; in addition, our approach can also serve as a delay compensator for an existing controller. Video (https://youtu.be/nURl_HTW_Mo) and code (https://github.com/dvij542/Delay-aware-Robust-Tube-MPC) are available.