Motion control of autonomous aggressive vehicle maneuvers

Aggressive vehicle maneuvers such as those performed by professional racing car drivers achieve high agility motion while motion stability is compromised. These aggressive maneuvers can be used to design human-inspired active safety features for “accident-free” vehicles. We present a novel control systems design for autonomous aggressive robotic maneuvers. Rather than restricting the vehicle motion within the stability region of its open-loop dynamics, the proposed control design allows the vehicle to operate outside the stability bounds to accomplish a safe and agile maneuver. We present a safety boundary design to augment the stability region. The autonomous control system is built on a modified nonlinear model predictive control. We use a 1/7 scaled robotic vehicle as a testbed to conduct experiments to demonstrate the performance of the developed control design.