Complex Trajectory Tracking Using PID Control for Autonomous Driving

In this paper, a Proportional-Integral-Differential (PID) controller that facilitates track maneuvering for self-driving cars is proposed. Three different design approaches are used to find and tune the controller hyper-parameters. One of them is "WAF-Tune", which is an ad hoc trial-and-error based technique that is specifically proposed in this paper for this specific application. The proposed controller uses only the Cross-Track-Error (CTE) as an input to the controller, whereas the output is the steering command. Extensive simulation studies in complex tracks with many sharp turns have been carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed controller at different speeds. The analysis shows that the proposed technique outperforms the other ones. The usefulness and the shortcomings of the proposed tuning mechanism are also discussed in details.