Robust and Adaptive Lateral Controller for Autonomous Vehicles

This thesis addresses the problem of controlling the lateral motion of an autonomous vehicle in the presence of parametric uncertainties, disturbances, and hard nonlinearities in the steering system, such as backlash in gears, stiction, hysteresis, and dead zones. The lateral motion of an autonomous vehicle is controlled by two cascaded controllers, the trajectory tracking controller and the steering angle controller. This thesis focuses on the development of both controllers using robust and adaptive control techniques. Two control strategies are developed to control the electric power steering angle, sliding mode control and adaptive backstepping control. The limitation of sliding mode control is first addressed, which is the chattering phenomena, and then a proposed methodology is presented to solve it using variable gain sliding mode control. Self-aligning moment acts as disturbance on the steering system that the controller has to compensate for. A model-based approach to estimate it is first developed and its limitations are addressed, which is tire parameters dependence. Two other approaches are then developed to overcome these limitations, the first one is a sliding mode observer, and the second one is part of a backstepping controller. Two approaches are developed to control the vehicle lateral trajectory, non-adaptive backstepping and adaptive backstepping. The extended matching design procedure is used in the adaptive backstepping controller to avoid the overestimation problem. Road curvature must be accurately known by the controller to follow the planned trajectory. It is usually measured by a camera, but the quality of the measurement is affected by environmental factors. An adaptive law is developed to estimate the road curvature online as part of an adaptive backstepping controller. Two feedforward approaches are presented to compensate for road curvature, one is derived from steady state vehicle lateral dynamics, and another is based on estimating the transfer function dynamics from road curvature to steering angle. Road bank angle is a significant disturbance in vehicle lateral control systems. A vehicle lateral state and disturbance observer is developed to estimate the road bank angle and the vehicle side slip angle, which are expensive to measure in current road vehicles, using extended Kalman filter. The observer combines a dynamical vehicle model with two measurements from inexpensive sensors.