Joint Communication, Control, and Learning for Connected and Autonomous Vehicles

Abstract

The use of connected and autonomous ground and aerial vehicles is a promising solution to reduce accidents, improve the traffic efficiency, and provide various services ranging from delivery of goods to monitoring. Different from the current connected vehicles and autonomous vehicles, connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) combine autonomy and wireless connectivity and use both sensors and communication systems to increase their situational awareness and for their decision-making. However, in order to reap all the benefits of deploying CAVs, one must consider the interconnection between communication, control, and learning mechanisms for the CAV system design. The key goal of this dissertation is, thus, to develop foundational science that can be used for the design, analysis, and optimization of CAV systems while jointly taking into account the synergies among communication, control, and learning systems. First, a joint communication and control system design is developed for non-coordinated CAVs when performing autonomous path tracking. In particular, the maximum time delay requirements are derived to guarantee the stability of the controller when tracking two typical road scenarios (i.e., straight line and circular curve). Tools from optimization theory and risk theory are then used to jointly optimize the control system and power allocation for the communication network so as to maximize the number of vehicular links that meet the controller's delay requirements. Second, the joint control and communication design framework is extended to two coordinated CAVs applications, i.e., CAV platoons and unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) swarms. Third, a distributed machine learning algorithm, i.e., federated learning (FL), is proposed for a swarm of connected and autonomous UAVs to execute tasks, such as coordinated trajectory planning and cooperative target recognition. In particular, a rigorous convergence analysis for FL is performed to show how wireless factors impact the FL convergence performance, and the design of UAV swarm networks is optimized to reduce the convergence time. Fourth, a new FL framework, called dynamic federated proximal (DFP) algorithm, is proposed for designing the autonomous controller of CAVs while considering the mobility of CAVs, the wireless fading channels, as well as the unbalanced and non independent and identically distributed data across CAVs. To improve the convergence of the proposed DFP algorithm, a contract-theoretic incentive mechanism is also proposed. Fifth, a wireless-enabled asynchronous federated learning (AFL) framework is proposed for urban air mobility (UAM) aircraft to collaboratively learn the turbulence prediction model. In particular, to characterize how UAM aircraft leverage wireless connectivity for AFL, a stochastic geometry based spatial model is developed and the wireless connectivity performance is analyzed. Then, a rigorous convergence analysis is performed for the proposed AFL framework to identify how fast the UAM aircraft converge to using the optimal turbulence prediction model. Sixth, based on the concordance order from stochastic ordering theory, a dependence control mechanism is proposed to improve the overall reliability of wireless networks for CAVs. Finally, to determine the optimal cache placement for CAVs, a novel spatio-temporal caching framework is proposed where the notion of graph motifs, i.e., the spatio-temporal communication patterns in wireless networks, is used. In conclusion, the frameworks presented in this dissertation will provide key fundamental guidelines to design, analyze, and optimize CAV systems.