Robust recursive path-following control for autonomous heavy-duty vehicles

• Autor(a) principal: Barbosa, Filipe Marques
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Texto Completo: http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/18/18153/tde-14032019-082753/
• topic: Controle lateral; Controle robusto; Heavy-duty vehicles; Lateral control; Path following; Robust control; Seguimento de caminho; Veículos pesados

Path following and lateral stability are crucial issues for autonomous vehicles. Moreover, these problems increase in complexity when handling heavy-duty vehicles due to their poor manoeuvrability, large sizes and mass variation. In addition, uncertainties on mass may have the potential to significantly decrease the performance of the system, even to the point of destabilising it. These parametric variations must be taken into account during the design of the controller. However, robust control techniques usually require offline adjustment of auxiliary tuning parameters, which is not practical and leads to sub-optimal operation. Hence, this work presents an approach to path-following and lateral control for autonomous heavy-duty vehicles subject to parametric uncertainties by using a robust recursive regulator. The main advantage of the proposed controller is that it does not depend on the offline adjustment of tuning parameters. Parametric uncertainties were assumed to be on the payload, and an H∞ controller was used for performance comparison in simulations. The performance of both controllers is evaluated in a double lane-change manoeuvre. Simulation results showed that the proposed method had better performance in terms of robustness, lateral stability, driving smoothness and safety, which demonstrates that it is a very promising control technique for practical applications. Ultimately, experiment tests in a rigid heavy-duty truck validate what was found in simulation results.