Lateral Control for Automated Vehicle Following System in Urban Environments

In contrast to highway, there are some sections not well maintained in urban roads. In these sections, there may be faint lane marks or static obstacles due to construction or some other reasons. Therefore, an automated vehicle following system such as traffic jam assistant should consider these sections to guarantee the safety of the system. In order to achieve this purpose, a model predictive control (MPC) scheme has been developed. The objectives of MPC are to compute the sequence of optimal steering input for vehicle following with obstacle avoidance. For this, the MPC uses the lead vehicle's state and obstacle's position obtained by lidars. For this purpose, a simplified nonlinear model of the vehicle was used to predict the future evolution of the system. Based on this prediction, performance index is optimized under operating constraints at each time step. A test vehicle equipped with two lidars on left and right corner of the front bumper has been developed. And the performance of the proposed MPC-based steering control algorithm has been investigated via vehicle test. Test results show the robust performance of vehicle following in urban environments.