Automatic steering of vehicles with reference angular velocity feedback

Automatic track guiding of vehicles is of increasing interest for Intelligent Vehicle/Highway Systems. Track guided vehicles are used in automated production facilities, ship docks, and for city busses which drive in special narrow lanes. The primary tack of such a system is to follow a path as well as possible. Track guiding systems have been designed for various controller structures. The present paper shows how to follow a given error-free path under some idealistic assumptions by feedforward of the estimated curvature of the reference path. For practical use this concept is not directly applicable, mainly due to unknown plant parameters and limited actuator force. However, a modified control concept based on this result yields good performance under realistic conditions.