Design and Simulation of Control Strategies for Trajectory Tracking in an Autonomous Ground Vehicle*

This paper presents the study of two nonlinear control strategies for trajectory tracking in an autonomous ground vehicle. Both approaches are designed using a kinematic model of the vehicle and tested using a dynamic model that includes the effects of inertia and delays. The first strategy considers a sliding mode control, whereas the second approach emulates the control scheme that was implemented on “Stanley”; the autonomous vehicle created by Stanford University's Racing Team in cooperation with the Volkswagen Electronics Research Laboratory (ERL). Testing and validation procedures for the implemented control strategies have been performed using an implementation of the aforementioned dynamic model in MATLAB-Simulink, assuming different trajectory curvatures and vehicle speeds.