Development of a Four-Wheel Steering Scale Vehicle for Research and Education on Autonomous Vehicle Motion Control

Autonomous vehicle motion control development requires testing and evaluation at all stages of the process. The development phase involving the instrumentation and operation of a full-size vehicle can be especially costly. Scale vehicles have been developed in the literature to serve as a cost-effective transition from testing in a simulation environment to a physical system. However, the existing scale vehicle platforms do not support four-wheel steering and cannot isolate the performance of motion control algorithms from other modules such as perception and path planning. This letter closes this gap by proposing a new scale vehicle platform, called JetRacer-4WS, based on the open-source JetRacer autonomous vehicle with additional modifications to support four-wheel steering, model predictive control-based path following, and high-precision ultrasonic-based real-time positioning. The proposed JetRacer-4WS can be used as a low-cost platform for both research and education on motion control, path following, and vehicle dynamics. We describe the design of JetRacer-4WS, and experimentally demonstrate JetRacer-4WS' ability to perform controller auto-tuning and illustrate the advantage of four-wheel steering. We also show that JetRacer-4WS can be used as a validation platform for testing advanced control algorithms such as event-triggered model predictive control.