Internal Model-Based Robust Path-Following Control for Autonomous Vehicles

The paper presents a new internal model control (IMC) based control technique for lateral trajectory tracking of autonomous vehicles. The controller’s proposed structure employs a robust, fault-tolerant nonlinear internal servo control with optimal reference generation concerning vehicle yaw stability and physical limitations. The presented inscription of the reference generation creates a convex optimization task that can be used in real-time applications. Improvements in yaw-rate stability of vehicle motion control are first shown through simulation results performed in a Simulink environment. The controller structure was also implemented in a real-time model and was examined in a Mercedes C-Class vehicle. In this article, the simulation results and the real-time measurements are presented. The results show that the proposed controller has high efficiency in disturbance rejection and lower sensitivity towards parameter changes compared to a model predictive control (MPC) structure.