Automatic steering of vehicles subject to actuator saturation and delay

In automatic vehicle steering applications the demand is towards developing more efficient and robust lane detection and tracking algorithms for safe lane keeping, merging and changing. The relevant control strategies, however, have to deal with delays which are inevitable obstacles to precise actuation, and there are nonlinearities at the actuators which are critical to address in order to improve the steering performance. We consider a vehicle yaw dynamics model where the actuator saturation constraints and delay are taken into account as practical control challenges. In order to achieve optimal automatic steering we propose a control design which combines delay compensation and anti-windup augmentation schemes addressing time-delay and saturation constraints simultaneously. The performance of our design methodology is evaluated using simulation results.