Development of a reduced size unmanned car

Abstract

This article describes the overall system design of a reduced size autonomous vehicle and focuses on the control strategy which is based on a Nonlinear Receding Horizon Control (NRHC) algorithm. The NRH planner is called by a high level manager, in the outer control loop, to solve a sequence of optimal control problems. The planned motion provide a sequence of reference set points for the faster inner control loop until a new plan is available. The lateral motion is controlled through the steering command by tracking the yaw rate reference. The longitudinal motion is controlled by means of the throttle/braking coupled command by tracking the planned forward speed profiles. The paper discusses the results of some simulation results. The project description proceeds as follows: Section II describes the system architecture from vehicle and communication to software. Section III and IV details the motion planning and control algorithms. In Section V the simulation results regarding the NRH based controller are discussed

Notes on Numerical Methods for Solving Optimal Control Problems

“…In particular the applications in vehicle dynamic field can be divided between off-line trajectory optimisation problems (30) (31) (33)- (35) and on-line receding horizon based implementation both for driving support (10) (36)- (41) and autonomous driving (42)- (45) . Details can be found in the cited papers.…”