Study of design directions for lateral vehicle control

Lateral vehicle control for passenger cars, a vital control subsystem of automated highway systems (AHS), has been studied for several decades. Different reference systems have been examined for detecting the lateral vehicle displacement from the lane center. Implementations of 'look-down' reference systems, however, encountered practical constraints, limiting driving speed to approximately 20 m/s under realistic conditions. This paper presents new perspectives on design directions for lateral vehicle controllers under practical AHS conditions for a variety of reference systems. A number of experimental results support the findings of this study.