May 20, 2016, Broida 1640

Wireless vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication may allow vehicles to obtain information beyond the line of sight which in turn can lead to improvements of safety, fuel economy and mobility in ground transportation systems. In this talk we put forward the idea of connected cruise control (CCC) that allow one to incorporate vehicles of different levels of autonomy in the traffic flow -- including human-driven vehicles that may or may be equipped with V2V devices. We construct models that take into account human reaction time as well as communication delays arising due to intermittency and packet drops. Then we apply techniques form optimal control of time delay systems to design controllers for CCC vehicles. Decomposing the arising Ricatti-type PDEs allows us to design the control gains sequentially with low computational cost. We demonstrate that the proposed controllers are capable of avoiding congestion for even low penetration of CCC vehicles.

Gabor Orosz received his MSc degree in Engineering Physics from the Budapest University of Technology, Hungary in 2002 and his PhD degree in Engineering Mathematics from the University of Bristol, UK in 2006. He held postdoctoral positions at the University of Exeter, UK and at the University of California, Santa Barbara before joining the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor in 2010 as an Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering. His research focuses on nonlinear dynamics and control, time-delay systems, networks and complex systems with applications on connected and automated vehicles and biological networks.