Improved path tracking approach for unmanned vehicles based on clothoid curve

For its high efficiency and simpleness, Pure-Pursuit has been widely used in fields of automatic drive. This paper presents a modified robust controller based on Pure-Pursuit. The highlight of the method is that it replaces the circle in Pure-Pursuit with a clothoid C1 curve. Meantime, it applies the curvature information from the clothoid curve to tune the look-ahead distance. We compare the controller with improved Pure-Pursuit through experiments on the platform of autonomous vehicle, TuZhi, developed by Wuhan University. The results demonstrate that the proposed controller is more effective.