Development of a reduced size unmanned car

This article describes the overall system design of a reduced size autonomous vehicle and focuses on the control strategy which is based on a Nonlinear Receding Horizon Control (NRHC) algorithm. The NRH planner is called by a high level manager, in the outer control loop, to solve a sequence of optimal control problems. The planned motion provide a sequence of reference set points for the faster inner control loop until a new plan is available. The lateral motion is controlled through the steering command by tracking the yaw rate reference. The longitudinal motion is controlled by means of the throttle/braking coupled command by tracking the planned forward speed profiles. The paper discusses the results of some simulation results. The project description proceeds as follows: Section II describes the system architecture from vehicle and communication to software. Section III and IV details the motion planning and control algorithms. In Section V the simulation results regarding the NRH based controller are discussed.