Simultaneous Cyber-Attack Detection and Radar Sensor Health Monitoring in Connected ACC Vehicles

This paper focuses on the detection of cyber-attacks on a wireless communication channel and simultaneous radar sensor 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 in the same lane. The wireless connectivity enables the 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 which is addressed in this paper. 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 first extensively evaluated in simulations. The estimation system is able to detect either a fault in the radar or a cyber-attack. Further, the proposed control strategy achieves resilient adaptive cruise control system operation by switching to larger time-gaps and a non-connected controller when a cyber-attack is detected. Finally, experimental data from a real vehicle on the I-94 Highway in Minneapolis, MN, USA is also used to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms. The fundamental estimation algorithm developed herein can be extended in the future to enable cyber-attack detection in more complex connected vehicle architectures.