Internal Model-Based Lateral and Longitudinal Control for Autonomous Electric Vehicles

In this paper, a novel lateral and longitudinal control algorithm is presented for autonomous vehicles. The proposed cascade structure has two loops: the inner loop is a force and moment-based internal model controller (IMC), and the outer loop is an optimization-based yaw-rate reference planner. IMC provides robustness against parameter changes and external disturbances, and the problem formulation of the optimization minimizes the intuitively tuned parameters of the controller. The proposed controller was tested and evaluated in simulation and real-time measurements on ThyssenKrupp's Lotus Evora test vehicle.