Path Tracking Control for Autonomous Driving Applications

Autonomous or self-driving vehicles are becoming a consolidate reality that involves both industrial and academic fields also for its impact in social and governmental communities, well far from automotive engineering. The intent of the present paper is to design an automatic steering control for an autonomous vehicle equipped with steer-by-wire and drive-by-wire technologies. The steering action is calculated to let the vehicle follow a reference path which is stored in a Digital Map properly built to be available in real-time. A Proportional + Derivative (PD) control strategy is deigned based on the Parameter State Approach (PSA) and it is coupled with a Feedforward (FF) term for improving the path tracking control in cornering maneuvers. Some experimental results are shown to demonstrates the efficacy of the controller presented.