Dynamics of Physical Autonomous Robotic Network With Constant And Time-Varying Communication Delays

Abstract

A Connected Autonomous Vehicle Network (CAVN) is an emerging paradigm that can reduce traffic congestion by allowing vehicles to cooperatively behave according to information out of the line of sight and improve traffic flow by decreasing inter-vehicular gaps on roadways. In this paper, the stability of CAVN with constant and time-varying communication delays is studied. When the time delay depends on time, the semi-discretization method is used to study the plant stability of the flow equilibrium of CAVN and construct approximate stability regions charts over control gain space. To study the influence of time-varying delay, a constant delay is considred as the average value of the time delay function. Then, explicit sufficient conditions are provided for the stability of the flow equilibrium and study the string stability of the CAVN. The proposed controller is validated using simulations and experimentally with a platoon of four autonomous robots under time-varying delays.