Design and stability analysis of a fuzzy controller for autonomous road following

In this paper, an intelligent vehicle is built using a remote control car. A fuzzy controller is developed for vision based autonomous road following. The analysis and design of fuzzy control laws for steering control of the autonomous nonholonomic robotic vehicle are described. This approach utilizes Lyapunov's direct method to formulate a class of control laws that guarantee the convergence of the steering error. Certain requirements for the control laws are presented for designers to choose a suitable rule base for the fuzzy controller in order to make the system asymptotically stable. Stability of the proposed fuzzy controller is guaranteed theoretically and also demonstrated by simulation studies and experiments. Simulations using the model of the four degree of freedom nonholonomic robotic vehicle are conducted to investigate the performance of the fuzzy controller. The proposed fuzzy controller can achieve the desired steering angle and make the robotic vehicle follow the road successfully. Experiments show that the developed intelligent vehicle is able to follow a mocked road autonomously.