A Look-Ahead Driver Model for Autonomous Cruising on Highways

This paper presents a look-ahead driver model with potential application to autonomous cruising of vehicles on highways. The driver model has two physically meaningful parameters: the look-ahead distance and the steering sensitivity. The two parameters are scheduled with respect to the vehicle speed using a preprocessor that converts open-loop steering response data to pseudo-closed-loop steering response data. Sample simulations with a realistic three-dimensional multibody vehicle model are presented for a lane-change scenario. The results indicate that the proposed driver model performs well for a wide range of vehicle speeds.