A novel path tracking approach considering safety of the intended functionality for autonomous vehicles

To reduce the adverse effect of the functional insufficiency of the steering system on the accuracy of path tracking, a path tracking approach considering safety of the intended functionality is proposed by coordinating automatic steering and differential braking in this paper. The proposed method adopts a hierarchical architecture consisting of a coordinated control layer and an execution control layer. In coordinated control layer, an extension controller considering functional insufficiency of the steering system, tire force characteristics and vehicle driving stability is proposed to determine the weight coefficients of automatic steering and the differential braking, and a model predictive controller is designed to calculate the desired front wheel angle and additional yaw moment. In execution control layer, a H infinity steering angle controller considering external disturbances and parameter uncertainty is designed to track desired front wheel angle, and a braking force distribution module is used to determine the wheel cylinder pressure of the controlled wheels. Both simulation and experiment results show that the proposed method can overcome the functional insufficiency of the steering system and improve the accuracy of path tracking while maintaining the stability of the autonomous vehicle.