Resilient control under cyber-attacks in connected ACC vehicles

This paper focuses on the detection of cyber-attack on a communication channel and simultaneous radar health monitoring for a connected vehicle. A semi-autonomous adaptive cruise control (SA-ACC) vehicle is considered which has wireless communication with its immediately preceding vehicle to operate at small time-gap distances without creating string instability. However, the reliability of the wireless connectivity is critical for ensuring safe vehicle operation. The presence of two unknown inputs related to both sensor failure and cyber-attack seemingly poses a difficult estimation challenge. The dynamic system is first represented in descriptor system form. An observer with estimation error dynamics decoupled from the cyber-attack signal is developed. The performance of the observer is extensively evaluated in simulations. The estimation system is able to detect either a fault in the velocity measurement radar channel or a cyber-attack. Also, the proposed observer-based controller achieves resilient SA-ACC system under the cyber-attacks. The fundamental estimation algorithm developed herein can be extended in the future to enable cyber-attack detection in more complex connected vehicle architectures.