Wireless cars: A cyber-physical approach to vehicle dynamics control

A non-conventional drive-by-wireless technology for guidance and control of a redundantly actuated electric car supported by an on-board wireless network of sensors, actuators and control units is proposed in this article. Several optimization-based distributed feedforward control schemes are developed for such powertrain infrastructures. In view of the limitations of the commercial off-the-shelf wireless communication technologies and the harshness of the in-vehicle environments, a pressing design and implementation aspect, in addition to the robustness against information loss, refers to fulfilling the hard real-time computational requirements. In this work, we address such problems by introducing several distributed event-based control schemes in conjunction with adaptive scheduling at the protocol level. Hereby we obtain a simple tuning mechanism to compromise between the outcome accuracy and computation efficiency (i.e., communication traffic intensity). Using simulative evaluations, we demonstrate the viability of the proposed algorithms and illustrate the impact of external interferences in an IEEE 802.15.4 based wireless communication solution.