Review article: State-of-the-art trajectory tracking of autonomous vehicles

Air pollution, energy consumption, and human safety issues have aroused people's concern around the world. This phenomenon could be significantly alleviated with the development of automatic driving techniques, artificial intelligence, and computer science. Autonomous vehicles can be generally modularized as environment perception, path planning, and trajectory tracking. Trajectory tracking is a fundamental part of autonomous vehicles which controls the autonomous vehicles effectively and stably to track the reference trajectory that is predetermined by the path planning module. In this paper, a review of the state-of-the-art trajectory tracking of autonomous vehicles is presented. Both the trajectory tracking methods and the most commonly used trajectory tracking controllers of autonomous vehicles, besides state-of-art research studies of these controllers, are described.