Estimation and stochastic control of nonlinear dynamic systems over the AWGN channel: Application in tele‐presence and tele‐operation of autonomous vehicles

Abstract This paper is concerned with tele‐presence and tele‐operation of autonomous vehicles over the Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) channel. This wireless communication channel is subject to transmission noise and transmission power constraint. An encoder, decoder and controller are proposed by implementing a novel linearization method for linearizing the nonlinear dynamic systems at operating points. For the linearized systems, the encoder, decoder and controller are implemented that were previously proposed for output tracking as well as stability of linear dynamic systems. Two novel linearization methods are proposed and their satisfactory performances are proved for output tracking as well as stability of nonlinear dynamic system. The first method is based on the fixed linearization rate and the second one is based on the variable (optimal) linearization rate. The decoder that is based on the second method is in fact the extended Kalman filter with the optimal linearization rate. The performances of these two methods are compared with each other and the other proposed methods by implementing them to the problems of the tele‐presence and tele‐operation of autonomous vehicles over the AWGN channel. Their satisfactory performances are illustrated. It is illustrated that the second method has higher computational complexity with slightly better performance and is applicable to a larger class of reference trajectories.