Yaw rate-based PID control for lateral dynamics of autonomous vehicles, design and implementation

The desired path following for an autonomous vehicle can be achieved by ensuring the desired yaw rate response. In conventional methods the control of lateral vehicle dynamics by means of yaw rate-based PID controller has sometimes been investigated but rarely implemented. An autonomous driving system can therefore be achieved by designing a reliable yaw rate controller for the vehicle. In this paper, an autonomous vehicle control architecture and a steering angle PID controller based on the vehicle’s yaw rate measured by a gyroscope is proposed and designed to handle most of the manoeuvres of an autonomous vehicle. It does not require measurements of lateral acceleration and lateral speed. The yaw rate reference is provided as an output by a higher-level system and used in the lower-level control loop. The validity of the proposed approach was tested experimentally on a 1:10 scale autonomous vehicle.