A sliding mode approach to automatic car steering

Abstract

Highway automation is a promising approach to cope with increasing traffic and road congestions. An important control subtask of an Intelligent Vehicle/Highway System is lateral vehicle control. Due to system uncertainties and the wide range of operating conditions, state-of-the-art robust control techniques are required. This paper introduces two efficient automatic steering controllers for the lane keeping of cars under highway conditions. The control design procedure is based on sliding mode control and robust state observation. It is shown that good tracking of a reference path, delineated either continuously or by discrete markers, can be achieved with a minimum effort in sensing and without preview of the road curvature.