Prescribed Tracking Performace for Lateral Control of an Autonomous Vehicle with High-Gain Observer

This paper presents a prescribed performance sliding mode approach (PPSMC) with a high-gain state observer for the double lane change maneuver of the autonomous vehicle. The proposed control method forces the tracking error to be bounded within a predefined region with a specific convergence rate, hence avoiding the overshoot phenomenon whenever the curvature of the desired path changes. Using the performance function, the original constrained tracking error is transformed into an equivalent unconstrained quantity, and the control signal is then constructed based on this transformed error. In addition, in practice, measuring precisely the entire state of the vehicle is generally demanding, especially the lateral velocity. Hence, the high-gain observer is introduced to estimate the full state of the system, which is then synthesized to the control signal. The stability of the closed-loop system is analyzed by means of the Lyapunov theory. The numerical simulations are carried out using the high-fidelity simulator Carsim and Matlab/Simulink to illustrate the effectiveness and validity of the proposed approach.