Lateral Shared Sliding Mode Control for Lane Keeping Assist System in Steer-by-Wire Vehicles: Theory and Experiments

The lane-keeping assistance design for steer-by-wire road vehicles is a multi-objective control problem that addresses lane tracking, improvement of driver comfort and ensuring vehicle stability. The designed architecture must be sensitive to various driver behaviors, provide assistance to drivers whenever required and ensure a smooth transition of authority between manual and automated driving modes. In this work, we propose a novel shared lane-keeping controller-based on quasi-continuous high-order sliding mode control dealing with the above challenges. The parameters of the controller are characterized by an upper bound estimate of the lateral wind’s force and the road curvature which acts as disturbances. Using the sharing parameter dependent on the monitored driver attribute, the authority is smoothly transitioned between various modes while accounting for driver behaviors. Experimental results on the SHERPA vehicle simulator shows the real-time implementation feasibility. Extensive results and discussions are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness and the applicability of the proposed controller.