Dynamic Characterization of Intelligent Vehicle Systems Theory and Experiment

This paper deals with controller design for path tracking control of intelligent vehicle systems. A two degrees of freedom (DOF) model is developed to represent the motion of a vehicle which is used to formulate the path tracking problem of vehicles. By using optimal control theory, the structure of a controller is obtained for vehicles with front and rear steering systems. In designing the controller, a quadratic measure of performance consisting of the integral of the errors (in position and orientation of the vehicle) and the input (front and rear wheel steering angles) are minimized. This controller is implemented to an experimental vehicle and the experimental results of its path following are presented.