Autonomous ground vehicle control system for high-speed and safe operation

This paper describes a new trajectory tracking control system for autonomous ground vehicles (AGV) toward safe and high-speed operation enabled by incorporating vehicle dynamics control (VDC) into the AGV. The control system consists of two levels: an AGV desired yaw rate generator based on a kinematic model, and a yaw rate controller based on the vehicle/tire dynamic models. The separation between AGV trajectory tracking and low-level actuation allows the incorporation of the VDC into the AGV systems. Sliding mode control is utilized to handle the system uncertainties. The performance of the proposed control system is evaluated by using a high-fidelity (experimentally validated) full-vehicle sport utility vehicle (SUV) model (rear-drive and front-steer) provided by CarSim® on a race track. Compared with the results for typically-employed position error based AGV control, significant performance improvement is observed.