  The majority of current studies on autonomous vehicle control via deep
reinforcement learning (DRL) utilize point-mass kinematic models, neglecting
vehicle dynamics which includes acceleration delay and acceleration command
dynamics. The acceleration delay, which results from sensing and actuation
delays, results in delayed execution of the control inputs. The acceleration
command dynamics dictates that the actual vehicle acceleration does not rise up
to the desired command acceleration instantaneously due to dynamics. In this
work, we investigate the feasibility of applying DRL controllers trained using
vehicle kinematic models to more realistic driving control with vehicle
dynamics. We consider a particular longitudinal car-following control, i.e.,
Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), problem solved via DRL using a point-mass
kinematic model. When such a controller is applied to car following with
vehicle dynamics, we observe significantly degraded car-following performance.
Therefore, we redesign the DRL framework to accommodate the acceleration delay
and acceleration command dynamics by adding the delayed control inputs and the
actual vehicle acceleration to the reinforcement learning environment state,
respectively. The training results show that the redesigned DRL controller
results in near-optimal control performance of car following with vehicle
dynamics considered when compared with dynamic programming solutions.
