Control strategy for high-speed autonomous driving in structured road

Abstract

This paper presents an control strategy for high-speed autonomous vehicles as an active safety procedure. Safe trajectories are generated using the modified steer field method, in which the simplified dynamics of the vehicle are used to predict the state of the vehicle over the look-ahead horizon. To compensate for the dissimilarity between the simplified model and the actual vehicle, a separate controller is designed to track the generated trajectory. The longitudinal dynamics of the vehicle are controlled using the inverse dynamics of the vehicle powertrain model, and the lateral dynamics are controlled using a linear quadratic regulator. Simulation results on a full non-linear vehicle model show that the proposed combination of path planning algorithm and path tracking algorithm gives satisfactory online obstacle avoidance and path tracking performance.