Design of a Control System for an Autonomous Vehicle Based on Adaptive-PID

TLDR

An autonomous vehicle integrates multi‑sensor navigation, positioning, intelligent decision making and control, yet traditional controllers struggle to guarantee performance and stability across varying parameters and disturbances. The paper proposes the Intelligent Pioneer control system architecture, employing an adaptive‑PID controller to achieve robust path tracking and motion stability in unknown environments. The authors model the vehicle with a two‑degree‑of‑freedom dynamic system in state‑space form and implement an adaptive‑PID controller to enhance control flexibility and performance. In the 2010 and 2011 Future Challenge of China, Intelligent Pioneer completed all competition programmes, winning first place in 2010 and third in 2011, demonstrating the effectiveness of the adaptive‑PID approach.

Abstract

The autonomous vehicle is a mobile robot integrating multi-sensor navigation and positioning, intelligent decision making and control technology. This paper presents the control system architecture of the autonomous vehicle, called “Intelligent Pioneer”, and the path tracking and stability of motion to effectively navigate in unknown environments is discussed. In this approach, a two degree-of-freedom dynamic model is developed to formulate the path-tracking problem in state space format. For controlling the instantaneous path error, traditional controllers have difficulty in guaranteeing performance and stability over a wide range of parameter changes and disturbances. Therefore, a newly developed adaptive-PID controller will be used. By using this approach the flexibility of the vehicle control system will be increased and achieving great advantages. Throughout, we provide examples and results from Intelligent Pioneer and the autonomous vehicle using this approach competed in the 2010 and 2011 Future Challenge of China. Intelligent Pioneer finished all of the competition programmes and won first position in 2010 and third position in 2011.