Optimal control with preview for lateral steering of a passenger car: Design and test on a driving simulator

Abstract

This paper is dedicated to studying the characteristics of the optimal preview control for lateral steering of a passenger vehicle. Such control is known to guarantee improved performance when the near future of the exogenous signal, here the road curvature, is known. The synthesis is performed in continuous time and leads to a two-degrees of freedom feedback and feedforward controller, whose feedforward part is a finite impulse response filter. The controller has been implemented on the SCANeR™Driving Simulator available at IRCCyN, whose steering column is electrically powered. A methodology for choosing the weighting matrices in the quadratic index and the preview time are finally proposed. The obtained experimental results are discussed as well. © 2012 Springer-Verlag GmbH Berlin Heidelberg.