Trajectory tracking control optimization with neural network for autonomous vehicles

Abstract

For mission-critical and time-sensitive navigation of autonomous vehicles, controller design must exhibit excellent tracking performance with respect to the speed of convergence to reference command and steady-state accuracy. In this article, a novel design integration of the neural network with the traditional control system is proposed to adaptively obtain optimized controller parameters resulting in improved transient and steady-state performance of motion and position control of autonomous vehicles. Application of the proposed intelligent control scheme to mobile robot navigation was presented for an eight-shaped trajectory by optimizing a Lyapunov-based nonlinear controller. Furthermore, a Linear Quadratic Regulator-based controller was optimized based on the proposed strategy to control the pitch and yaw angles of a 2-Degree-of -Freedom helicopter. The simulation results showed that the proposed scheme outperforms the traditional controllers in terms of the speed of convergence to the desired trajectory and overall error minimization.