Secure Observer-Based Collision-Free Control for Autonomous Vehicles Under Non-Gaussian Noises

This article is concerned with the secure collision-free tracking control problem for autonomous vehicles with uncertainties, where system signals are transmitted through constrained communication networks. In such open and uncertain environments, the control performance of vehicles is seriously affected by privacy leakage, non-Gaussian noise, and obstacles. The aim of this research is to propose a tracking control scheme that ensures security, mean-square boundedness, and collision-free performance concurrently. Initially, to safeguard the privacy of the transmitted data and to enable secure tracking control, a dynamic encoding-based ElGamal encryption mechanism is introduced, which is further embedded in the design of the observer-based tracking controller. Subsequently, a collision-free chance-constrained index is proposed for achieving real-time obstacle avoidance by comprehensively considering the influence of stochastic noises. A thorough analysis is conducted to examine the impact of non-Gaussian noise and unmeasurable states on the performance of collision-free tracking control. Sufficient conditions are derived to guarantee the desired performance, and the corresponding control inputs are obtained by solving certain optimization problems subject to chance constraints. Finally, an illustrative example is provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed secure collision-free tracking controller.