Adaptive Cruise Control with Auto-Steering for Autonomous Vehicles

Book excerpt: Wouldn't it be great if you could read a book or surf on internet etc. in driver's seat while traveling in your vehicle safely? One of the driver assistant systems currently under development by most automotive manufacturers is the Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) system. The major drawback of commercially available ACC systems is the limited performance in cornering situations, where the road presents current/future curvatures. In particular, the interaction between longitudinal and lateral controller systems has not been deeply studied. This work proposes a multi-layer control structure to create synergies and safe interaction between longitudinal and lateral controllers in order to obtain both lateral stability and safe clearance of advanced autonomous driving vehicle. It mainly focuses on the design of an Integrated Vehicle Dynamics Control strategy for Adaptive Cruise Control with auto-steering application intended to decrease driver's workload. The results of simulations conducted in Matlab/Simulink have shown that the proposed integrated controller satisfies the performance in terms of autonomous driving, path tracking and collision avoidance for various traffic situations.