15th Triennial World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control
  Barcelona, 21–26 July 2002 
A DYNAMIC INVERSION BASED CONTROLLER FOR PATH FOLLOWING OF CAR-LIKE VEHICLES
Luca Consolini* Aurelio Piazzi* Mario Tosques**
* Dipartimento di Ingegneria dell’Informazione, University of
Parma (Italy), e-mail:
{aur elio@ce.unipr.it,luca.consolini@polirone.mn.it}
** Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile, University of Parma,
(Italy), e-mail: mario.tosques@unipr.it

This paper focuses on a special path following task arising from the needs of vision-based autonomous guidance: a given front point of a car-like vehicle that is within the look-ahead range of a stereo vision system, must follow a prespecified Cartesian path. Solution to this path following problem is provided by a new feedforward-feedback control strategy where the feedforward is determined by a dynamic generator based on exact dynamic inversion over the nominal vehicle model and the feedback is mainly issued by correcting terms proportional to the tangential and normal errors determined with respect to the vehicle’s ideal trajectory. A convergence analysis of the resulting dynamic inversion based controller is established versus a vehicle’s uncertain model defined via equation errors. A simulation example highlighting the controller’s performances is included.
Keywords: Autonomous vehicles, Path following, Dynamic inversion, Nonlinear control systems, Feedforward control, Feedback control methods, Robust performance
Session slot T-Th-M14: Motion Control Design/Area code 2a : Control Design