Enhancing Driving Safety Through Robust Static Output-Feedback Path Tracking and Emergency Braking Control Under Network-Induced Delays

Autonomous vehicles represent a transformative technology with the potential to substantially enhance quality of life and revolutionize modern transportation systems. A fundamental objective of autonomous driving is path tracking, which involves ensuring the vehicle accurately follows a predetermined route. This task, however, is complicated by the potential presence of dynamic obstacles, such as pedestrians, stationary objects, or other vehicles, that may lead to collisions if not adequately managed. Additionally, precise path tracking relies on accurate knowledge of the vehicle’s internal states, many of which are difficult or prohibitively expensive to measure directly. Compounding these challenges are time delays that naturally arise in the perception, computation, and actuation loops of autonomous systems. Such delays can degrade control performance and compromise system stability if not properly addressed. To this end, this paper proposes a low-cost, robust static output-feedback path tracking controller that accounts for these inherent delays. A Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional is employed to rigorously ensure the system’s stability under the influence of time delays. In addition, an integrated emergency braking mechanism is incorporated to enhance safety by preventing collisions in critical scenarios. The effectiveness and reliability of the proposed control architecture are validated through comprehensive simulation studies conducted using CarSim.