Physics-informed Machine Learning with Heuristic Feedback Control Layer for Autonomous Vehicle Control

This paper proposes a novel physics-informed ma-chine learning framework for motion planning and control of autonomous vehicles. By integrating longitudinal and lat-eral control, a nonlinear control problem is formulated using Model Predictive Control (MPC). To address computational challenges, a self-supervised framework, Recurrent Predictive Control (RPC), is introduced, leveraging differentiable neural networks and recurrent neural networks to train a neural network controller. Additionally, a heuristic feedback control layer is designed to reduce steady-state errors in the closed-loop tracking. Through numerical simulations and co-simulations using Simulink and CarSim, five neural network controllers are compared with an MPC controller in a lane-changing sce-nario. The proposed RPC framework improves computational efficiency by 95% compared to MPC, enhances generalization performance compared to Approximate MPC, and reduces performance loss by 17% compared to Differentiable Predictive Control. The heuristic feedback control layer further reduces steady-state errors and improves convergence speed during training.