A supervised Actor–Critic approach for adaptive cruise control

A novel supervised Actor–Critic (SAC) approach for adaptive cruise control (ACC) problem is proposed in this paper. The key elements required by the SAC algorithm namely Actor and Critic, are approximated by feed-forward neural networks respectively. The output of Actor and the state are input to Critic to approximate the performance index function. A Lyapunov stability analysis approach has been presented to prove the uniformly ultimate bounded property of the estimation errors of the neural networks. Moreover, we use the supervisory controller to pre-train Actor to achieve a basic control policy, which can improve the training convergence and success rate. We apply this method to learn an approximate optimal control policy for the ACC problem. Experimental results in several driving scenarios demonstrate that the SAC algorithm performs well, so it is feasible and effective for the ACC problem.