Energy Dissipation Based Longitudinal and Lateral Coupling Control for Intelligent Vehicles

This paper proposes a combined longitudinal and lateral control approach for an intelligent vehicle system based on energy dissipation. The vehicle system dynamics resembles a series of mass/spring/damper systems that are dissipative, i.e., the energy of the system decays to zero eventually. Thus, the nonlinear-optimal longitudinal and lateral coupling control problem of the intelligent vehicle system is transformed into a dissipative control design based on an energy storage function. To satisfy the gamma-performance, with respect to the quadratic supply rate, the storage function is developed by using a back-stepping based Lyapunov method and a step-by-step improvement of performance bounds. A dissipative feedback control law is formulated by successive approximation based on the step-by-step reduction of the value of gamma. The results of the adaptive vehicle control simulations and test-bed experiments are provided and verified by the respective comparison of energy consumption on different values of c and speed adaption under different road geometries.