Lateral Control of an Autonomous and Connected Following Vehicle With Limited Preview Information

Abstract

Lateral control of an autonomous and connected vehicle (ACV), especially in emergency situations, is important from the safety viewpoint. In these situations, the trajectory to be followed by an ACV must either be planned in real-time (e.g., for a possible evasion maneuver if the obstacle to be avoided is detected) or be communicated from its preceding vehicle. Typically, the trajectory information is available to the following ACV in the form of GPS time samples. From the viewpoint of lateral control, the lateral velocity information is not readily available and the feedback structure must reflect this reality. In this paper, we develop a methodology to synthesize a lateral control algorithm for a following ACV in a two-vehicle platoon in two steps: 1) From the limited preview information of the trajectory to be tracked via samples of GPS way points, we estimate the radius of curvature of the trajectory using “least-square” estimation and 2) develop a fixed-structure feedback control scheme for following the predecessor by synthesizing the set of stabilizing gains corresponding to lateral position error, heading error and heading rate error. Numerical simulation and experimental results corroborate the effectiveness of the proposed schemes.