Optimised robust path following control of autonomous vehicle with pole constraints

This paper presents a robust output-feedback guaranteed-cost control strategy for the path following control of autonomous vehicles. First, the model of vehicle dynamics and path following is established, which takes the uncertainties of cornering stiffness into account. Then, to deal with such uncertainties and improve the transient performance, a robust guaranteed-cost controller is introduced with the regional pole constraint ability. Considering that it is expensive and difficult to measure the side slip angle accurately, the proposed controller utilises an output-feedback scheme without side slip angle information. Moreover, the particle swarm optimisation (PSO) algorithm is selected to optimise the performance index of the guaranteed-cost controller such that the priorities among different objectives can be decided reasonably. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller and its advantages over previous studies in the presence of parameter uncertainties.