Tele-operation of autonomous vehicles over additive white Gaussian noise channel

This paper is concerned with the tele-operation of autonomous vehicles over analog Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel, which is subject to transmission noise and power constraint. The nonlinear dynamic of autonomous vehicle is described by the unicycle model and is cascaded with a bandpass filter acting as encoder. Using the describing function method, the nonlinear dynamic of autonomous vehicle is represented by an approximate linear system. Then, the available results for linear control over analog AWGN channel are extended to account for linear continuous time systems with non - real valued and multiple real valued eigenvalues and for tracking a non-zero reference signal. Subsequently, by applying the extended results on the describing function of autonomous vehicles, a mean square control technique including an encoder, decoder and a controller is presented for reference tracking of the tele-operation of autonomous vehicles over AWGN channel. The satisfactory performance of the proposed control technique is illustrated by computer simulations.