On stability for state-lattice trajectory tracking control

In order to guarantee that a self-driving vehicle is behaving as expected, stability of the closed-loop system needs to be rigorously analyzed. The key components for the lowest levels of control in self-driving vehicles are the controlled vehicle, the low-level controller and the local planner. The local planner that is considered in this work constructs a feasible trajectory by combining a finite number of precomputed motions. When this local planner is considered, we show that the closed-loop system can be modeled as a nonlinear hybrid system. Based on this, we propose a novel method for analyzing the behavior of the tracking error, how to design the low-level controller and how to potentially impose constraints on the local planner, in order to guarantee that the tracking error is bounded and decays towards zero. The proposed method is applied on a truck and trailer system and the results are illustrated in two simulation examples.