Robust Optimal Prescribed Performance Control of Adaptive Cruise Control Systems With Unknown Dynamics

Conventional ACC method has great fluctuation and deviation when solving speed and distance control problems. Thus, this paper develops a reinforcement learning (RL) based robust optimal prescribed performance controller for ACC systems. To this end, we first construct a continuous time ACC system with unknown system dynamics (e.g., target vehicle acceleration, sensor and actuator attacks, etc). To estimate the unknown system dynamics, an unknown system dynamic estimator (USDE) is designed, where the unknown system dynamic can be accurately estimated by using the input-output information, this is helpful for controller design. Then, a RL based optimal control method is developed, where the prescribed performance function (PPF) is applied, the system states can be effectively defined within a certain range. To realize the online solution for optimal control, we design a new adaptive law based on the adaptive dynamic programming (ADP) framework to online learn the critic neural network (NN) weights, because of the strong convergence, the proposed learning algorithm can be effectively applied in practical industrial systems. Finally, the efficacy of the proposed control technique is tested through simulations and experiments.