Intersection-Traffic Control of Autonomous Vehicles using Newton-Raphson Flows and Barrier Functions

This paper concerns an application of a recently-developed nonlinear tracking technique to trajectory control of autonomous vehicles at traffic intersections. The technique uses a flow version of the Newton-Raphson method for controlling a predicted system-output to a future reference target. Its implementations are based on numerical solutions of ordinary differential equations, and it does not specify any particular method for computing its future reference trajectories. Consequently it can use relatively simple algorithms on crude models for computing the target trajectories, and more-accurate models and algorithms for trajectory control in the tight loop. We demonstrate this point at an extant predictive traffic planning-and-control method with our tracking technique. Furthermore, we guarantee safety specifications by applying to the tracking technique the framework of control barrier functions.