Vehicle speed preview control with road curvature information for safety and comfort promotion

Abstract

Vehicle lateral acceleration is a critical state and index for vehicle safety and ride comfort. To limit it in high speed cornering situation, a vehicle speed preview controller is proposed with the information of future road curvature, just as a human driver behavior. The future road curvature can be obtained from high definition map in intelligent vehicle control, and to implement it, model predictive control method (MPC) is implemented taking advantage of its preview nature. In this preview speed control framework, a novel kinematics model with vehicle location, speed and track curvature is established for vehicle states prediction. The control performance index of MPC is constructed with vehicle road following index and lateral acceleration index with the aiming of promoting safety and ride comfort. The controller is evaluated during cornering with different road trajectory, initial speed, preview time and road adhesion coefficient in a hardware-in-the-loop simulation platform. It is testified that vehicle slows down before cornering as human driver does to decrease lateral acceleration and steering angle with the benefit of promoting comfort and safety.