A novel sliding mode control for lane keeping in road vehicles

In this paper, a novel sliding mode (SM) control is developed for vehicle lane keeping. The proposed SM controller can enable the vehicle to track the reference road center-line and yaw direction with zero errors. The idea behind the SM controller are as follows: first, lateral vehicle dynamics system is divided into two subsystems. Lateral position error dynamics system is recognized as a predominant subsystem, while yaw angle error dynamics system is an affiliate subsystem. Then, an SM controller is designed for the predominant subsystem to achieve asymptotical convergence of lateral position error. Since the components related to yaw angle dynamics in the equivalent control input signal of front wheel steering angle have the pole-placement function to yaw angle dynamics, the stability of the affiliate subsystem and asymptotical convergence of yaw angle error finally can be ensured. Thus, the SM controller designed for predominant subsystem can achieve decoupled control for both lateral position error dynamics and yaw angle error dynamics. The excellent performance of the proposed SM control is demonstrated by simulation results.