Control of an autonomous vehicle: design and first practical results

The lateral and the longitudinal dynamics of a vehicle are usually controlled separately. The paper deals mainly with the control concept and presents first practical results of the lateral module of an autonomous road vehicle, which is driven by a robot. The design of a robust H/sub 2/-controller based on standard H/sub 2//H/sub /spl infin//-algorithms is described. An additional curvature compensation function is introduced to minimize the lateral deviation caused by the bending of the desired path. The resulting feedforward control structure simplifies the task of the controller significantly. Additionally, the longitudinal control module implemented in the robot is presented briefly.