Unified dynamic and geometrical vehicle guidance strategy to cope with the discontinuous reference trajectory

Abstract

The most lateral vehicle guidance controllers proposed in the literature require a continuous reference trajectory. However, the controller performance can be deteriorated when the use of discontinuous reference trajectory in terms of position is unavoidable. In fact, this last leads to a large tracking error generating a large steering angle decreasing the vehicle manoeuvrability. To address this problem, a unified lateral guidance controller combining both dynamic and geometric approaches is presented. The main advantage of this controller is the use of few tuning parameters to modify the lateral guidance dynamic performance and to reduce the impact of the discontinuous reference trajectory. The effectiveness of the developed approach is evaluated through several simulations with a realistic vehicle model using CarMaker IPG.