The viewpoint and principles of guidance and control theory provide the basis for structuring an analytical model that describes the driver's steering control of motor vehicles. The model has as its elements the vehicle equations of motion, experimentally derived models for the human operator's dynamic response characteristics, and descriptions of the roadway environment. A variety of single-loop and multiloop feedback systems are synthesized and examined to select three good but simple and like alternative system configurations: time-advanced lateral deviation, which has a primary outer-loop feedback of lateral position in the lane with lead equalization provided by perceptual preview along the future track of the vehicle, path angle plus inertial lateral deviation, which contains a path angle inner loop and a lateral position outer loop, and heading angle plus inertial lateral deviation, which has both heading angle and lateral position feedback loops. the resultant models give the highway engineer an analytical tool that can be used to determine the role of each system element (driver, vehicle, etc.), to define the interaction between elements, and to assess the effect of changing system parameters at the preliminary design stage. /author/.
Abstract