Optimizing the PID controller to control the longitudinal motion of autonomous vehicles

Abstract

Some challenges in the development of driverless vehicles, like building a model representing the dynamics of the velocity, designing a longitudinal controller, and the optimization technique are still being searched until now. In this work, a longitudinal controller based on the Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) is proposed; where a Slap-Swarm-Algorithm (SSA) is employed to adjust the gains of the controller. To evaluate the performance accuracy of the suggested algorithm, it was compared with the commonly used algorithm in literature which is Particle-Swarm-Optimization (PSO). Moreover, the PID-controller based on the proposed algorithm is used for different velocities tracking to explore the performance power of the optimized gains. The outcomes of the simulation illustrated that the combined controller with the suggested algorithm achieved a very well performance for tracing the desired speed with an enhancement percentage of (2.1816%) than the controller based on the PSO algorithm. As well, the proposed controller managed to track various desired velocity profiles with high efficiency.