A sliding mode control approach to automatic car steering

Highway automation is a promising approach to cope with increasing road traffic and congestions. An important control subtask of an intelligent vehicle/highway system is automatic steering for 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 automatic steering controllers for cars driving under highway conditions. The control design is based on sliding mode control and robust state observation. It is shown that good tracking of a reference path, delineated either continuously or discretely, can be achieved with a minimum effort in sensing and without preview of the road curvature.