Design of Active Disturbance Rejection Controller for Trajectory-Following of Autonomous Ground Electric Vehicles

Abstract

In this paper, the concept of symmetry is utilized in the promising trajectory-following control design of autonomous ground electric vehicles—that is, the construction and the solution of active disturbance rejection controllers are symmetrical. This paper presents an active disturbance rejection controller (ADRC) for improving the trajectory-following performance of autonomous ground electric vehicles (AGEV) with an advanced active front steering system. Since AGEV trajectory dynamics are inherently affected by complex traffic conditions, various driving maneuvers, and other road environment, the main control objective is to deal with the AGEV trajectory control challenges of system uncertainties, system nonlinearities, and external disturbance. First, the vehicle dynamics trajectory-following model and its state space representation system are established. Then, the augmented control-oriented vehicle-trajectory-following system with dynamic error is developed. The resulting active disturbance rejection controller of the vehicle-trajectory-following system is finally designed using the trajectory performance index and active disturbance compensation, and the stability of the active disturbance rejection controller is also analyzed and derived via Lyapunov stability theory. The effectiveness of the proposed controller is validated through double lane change and serpentine maneuvers under the co-simulation platform of MATLAB/Simulink-Carsim®. Simulation results show that the designed controller provides enhanced vehicle-trajectory-following performance compared to the linear quadratic regulator controller (LQR) and model predictive controller (MPC). It will provide a certain guidance for the controller engineering design of the AGEV trajectory-following system.