Adaptive comfort-oriented vehicle lateral control with online controller adjustments according to driver behaviour and look-ahead dynamics

Abstract

This paper presents a comfort-oriented adaptive fuzzy-model predictive control strategy to control the lateral motion of a vehicle with the steering angle as the input while preventing sudden changes and unwanted motions. This is reached by utilizing three main contributions: an adaptive fuzzy model based on look-ahead dynamics, limiting the controller to the acceptable range of states to the driver and introducing an adjustment factor to the controller's cost function. Using adaptive-fuzzy models to describe the vehicle lateral dynamics and driver behaviour for the purpose of the control-oriented model enables this method of control to advantage from the low computational effort of the models while maintaining the accuracy and adaptive properties which are crucial to the performance and robustness of the system during the manoeuvres. Also, the characteristics of each driver's behaviour modify the controller towards a more comfort-oriented drive with means of the cost function and constraints. The comparative simulation indicates that the developed method leads to a comfort-oriented drive, in that the vehicle's states stay within the limits of the driver behaviour range, the fluctuations are insignificant and the control strategy is more accurate than previous methods.