Integrated Longitudinal and Lateral Control System Design for Autonomous Vehicles

AbstractThis paper presents the design of an integrated longitudinal and lateral controller for autonomous vehicles. Firstly, the problem of longitudinal controller design is to concentrate on the design of spacing policy and its associated control law. A Safety Spacing Policy (SSP) is proposed, and a sliding mode controller is designed. String stability as well as traffic flow stability issues of the proposed SSP are studied. It's shown that the SSP can provide stable string operation and stable traffic flow under certain conditions. Secondly, a multi-model fuzzy controller is proposed to cope with the vehicle lateral control. This multi-model fuzzy controller contains four local fuzzy controllers which correspond to four velocity intervals. In order to avoid the undesired peaks which may appear during the commutation of the different local controllers, a fusion block based on a fuzzy type strategy is designed. Finally, the integration of the longitudinal and lateral controllers is presented, and the simulation results show that the proposed controller has good performances under different scenarios.