Immersion and invariance vs sliding mode control for reference trajectory tracking of autonomous vehicles

This paper focuses on the lateral control of intelligent vehicles. The aim is to minimize the lateral displacement of the autonomous vehicle with respect to a given reference trajectory. We present design and validation of two vehicle lateral controllers. The first controller based on higher-order sliding mode control (SMC) has been developed in [1]. The second controller is based on Immersion and Invariance (I&I) principle. Given the implicit resemblance between the SMC and the I&I principle, the comparison allows us to highlight the advantages and disadvantages of each control strategy for robust lane keeping for intelligent vehicles. To validate the control strategies, the closed-loop system has been simulated on Matlab-Simulink has been made using the experimental data acquired on the vehicle DYNA of Heudiasyc laboratory, a Peugeot 308, according to several real driving scenarios. The validation shows robustness and performances of each control approach, and puts in evidence the improvement brought by the I&I controller.