Advanced vehicle control systems (AVCS) offer great potential to reduce traffic congestion, decrease travel times, and increase safety. Automated lateral control is an integral part of AVCS. To date, most research has focused on lateral control for lane and curve tracking, and lane merging. To implement an automated control system, it must be able to sense and safely react to emergency situations. An emergency lateral control strategy is presented that accounts for changing vehicle speed using continuous gain equations. A linear vehicle/tyre model is used in the development of a linear state model. A nonlinear vehicle/tyre model is used in the optimization of the feedback gains. Because the state model is velocity dependent, feedback gains are derived for discrete vehicle speeds. These data points are then used to derive continuous gain equations for the feedback gains. The performance using the gain equations is compared to that of using constant gains. Conclusions are drawn about the performance and robustness of the controller using the continuous gain equations. Vehicle response is improved with the use of continuous gain equations, for both single and double lane changes.
Abstract