Towards time-optimal race car driving using nonlinear MPC in real-time

Abstract

This paper addresses the real-time control of autonomous vehicles under a minimum traveling time objective. Control inputs for the vehicle are computed from a nonlinear model predictive control (MPC) scheme. The time-optimal objective is reformulated such that it can be tackled by existing efficient algorithms for real-time nonlinear MPC that build on the generalized Gauss-Newton method. We numerically validate our approach in simulations and present a real-world hardware setup of miniature race cars that is used for an experimental comparison of different approaches.