Tracking Control by the Newton-Raphson Flow: Applications to Autonomous Vehicles

This paper concerns applications of a recently-developed output-tracking technique to trajectory control of autonomous vehicles. The technique is based on three principles: Newton-Raphson flow for solving algebraic equations, output prediction, and controller speedup. Early applications of the technique, made to simple systems of an academic nature, were implemented by simple algorithms requiring modest computational efforts. In contrast, this paper tests it on commonly-used dynamic models to see if it can handle more complex control scenarios. Results are derived from simulations as well as a laboratory setting, and they indicate effective tracking convergence despite the simplicity of the control algorithm.