Preview Control for Vehicle Lateral Guidance in Highway Automation

TLDR: In this paper, a continuous time deterministic optimal preview control algorithm is applied to the lateral guidance of a vehicle for an automated highway, where the front wheel steering angle of the vehicle is controlled so that the vehicle follows the center for a lane with small tracking error and maintains good ride quality simultaneously.

Abstract: The continuous time deterministic optimal preview control algorithm is applied to the lateral guidance of a vehicle for an automated highway. In the lateral guidance problem, the front wheel steering angle of the vehicle is controlled so that the vehicle follows the center for a lane with small tracking error and maintains good ride quality simultaneously. A preview control algorithm is obtained by minimizing a quadratic performance index which includes terms representing the passenger ride quality as well as the lateral tracking error, each of these terms is multiplied by a frequency dependent weight. It is shown that the optimal preview control law consists of a feedback control term and two feedforward control terms. The feedforward preview control action significantly improves the tracking performance and ride quality. Frequency-domain analyses, as well as numerical simulation results, show the improvements achieved by using the preview control algorithm in both the frequency and time domains.