Throttle and Brake Combined Control for Intelligent Vehicle Highway Systems

This paper summarizes the design of a throttle and brake combined controller and experimental work done for the longitudinal control of autonomous vehicles. This paper presents a sliding mode based longitudinal control law, brake system sub-model, brake control law and a throttle/brake switching algorithm. The developed control strategies were implemented on a test vehicle and the longitudinal combined controls tested with a single vehicle using a predetermined trajectory of desired speed as a function of time. These initial test results showed good tracking, good ride quality and smooth switching between throttle and brake.