Latency-Robust Control of High-Speed Signal-Free Intersections

TL;DR

This paper investigates how communication latency affects the safety and capacity of high-speed signal-free intersections managed by autonomous vehicles, proposing a control law to ensure safety despite delays.

Contribution

It introduces a latency-resilient control law for autonomous vehicle intersections and analytically quantifies the impact of latency on throughput.

Findings

Proposed a piecewise-linear control law ensuring safety under latency.

Quantified the intersection capacity degradation due to latency.

Demonstrated safety and capacity bounds analytically.

Abstract

High-speed signal-free intersections are a novel urban traffic operations enabled by connected and autonomous vehicles. However, the impact of communication latency on intersection performance has not been well understood. In this paper, we consider vehicle coordination at signal-free intersections with latency. We focus on two questions: (i) how to ensure latency-resiliency of the coordination algorithm, and (ii) how latency affects the intersection's capacity. We consider a trajectory-based model with bounded speed uncertainties. Latency leads to uncertain state observation. We propose a piecewise-linear control law that ensures safety (avoidance of interference) as long as the initial condition is safe. We also analytically quantify the throughput that the proposed control can attain in the face of latency.