Robust Vehicular Lane-Tracking Control With a Winding Road Disturbance Compensator

In a dynamic lateral motion model with a look-ahead distance, curved and winding roads appear as an unmatched disturbance to a lane-tracking control system. In this article, an innovative vehicular robust lane-tracking control scheme is proposed to compensate for the problematic winding road disturbance (WRD) that always appears unless the road has zero curvature. We propose a design for a WRD compensator (WRDC) to substantially improve the lane-tracking control performance on a winding road in the presence of the WRD. The WRDC redesigns the state-space reference, rather than calculating the additional control input. We show that the proposed WRDC ensures that the projected tracking error decreases to zero. To validate the usefulness of the robust lane-tracking control, the WRDC is compared to other conventional methods. We observe that the proposed WRDC is not only robust against road curvature variation, but also outperforms the lane-tracking control performance of other popular methods.