Lateral control of an articulated bus for lane guidance and curbside precision docking

This paper presents the design, implementation, and field testing of a lane assist system that provides lane guidance and curbside precision docking functions for a 60 ft articulated bus. The challenges in this lateral control design include the extra lightly-damped mode from the articulated section, the relatively large disturbance due to the sharp S-curves for precision docking, and the uncertainties introduced by public roads and live traffic. To tackle these challenges, the control problem is formulated as a mixed H₂/H_∞ synthesis problem and solved by LMI optimization. Extensive field tests were conducted in live traffic and the results show adequate and consistent performances.