On Optimal Lateral Tracking Control for Multi-Steered Autonomous Vehicles

Sammanfattning: The transport industry is experiencing a disruption as fully autonomous vehicles are introduced in traffic. The intelligent, driverless vehicles will reduce cost, liberate human effort and increase safety. Today, the hardware technology seems to have reached the required processing power, but the decision-making algorithm still has a long way to go until they’re proven to be road-safe. Among these is the problem of lateral path tracking control. This thesis will consider the lateral control problem with the goal to send the right signal to the steering actuators so that the vehicle follows a predetermined trajectory. The vehicle in question is a triaxial, rigid, electric truck with active steering on both front and rearmost wheels. With servo latency and large inertial parameters in mind, a highly accurate model of the lateral and yaw behavior must be identified in order to predict the vehicle dynamics for a given steering input. Then, the properties of an optimal lateral controller are iteratively improved until a sufficiently low tracking error is obtained. Lastly, the controller is tuned to guarantee robustness for a range of uncertain vehicle parameters. The derived triaxial model with servo actuation is proven to be better at predicting the vehicle dynamics compared to other models common in literature with only one active steering input. When constructing a lateral controller, the importance was shown of considering 1) state feedback control of the lateral error, 2) feedforward control operating on future road curvature, 3) integrating control which combats biases and model errors, 4) using a tailored triaxial model and 5) minimizing the control signal change. Lastly, the derived controller was shown to have a decent stability margin with respect to estimated uncertainties.