Robust steering control for trajectory following in road traffic environments

The process of modelling vehicle motion in a road traffic environment requires the integration of trajectory generation with vehicle control. The steps involved here are generating a feasible trajectory based on the existing traffic and tracking the trajectory to control it with a steering angle input. Since the parameters of a physical system vary with changes in operating conditions, it is important to consider robustness when designing controllers. This article aims at developing a trajectory-following model with robust steering control strategies to accurately follow a generated trajectory. In this study, performance-based proportional, robust proportional and sliding mode control strategies are designed for trajectory following. The robustness of the proportional controller is established using Kharitonov’s theorem, which is compared with a proportional controller tuned for performance. Sliding mode control is designed for robustness and chattering elimination using two kinds of reaching laws – a constant reaching law and a novel power rate exponential reaching law. The controllers are designed using a dynamic bicycle model considering the error with respect to the trajectory. The controllers are then evaluated in IPG CarMaker®. The resulting trajectories and control inputs are compared for the considered control methodologies using the ISO double lane change and the Slalom tests. Sliding mode control with power rate exponential reaching law is concluded to be more robust as compared to the other controllers, with lower response times, up to 84% lower heading angle deviations from the trajectory and an overshoot of only 3.2% in lane changing.