Autonomous Vehicle Control Near the Limit of Friction

An autonomous vehicle controller is presented for the purposes of improving vehicle path tracking at high speeds and near tire traction limits. Improvements to the state of the art are made by reducing the number of sensors and feedback variables needed to achieve dynamic control, and by tightly integrating traction control with a steering output controller to correct for modeling errors and actual disturbances. The controller is designed to interface with a path generation module, from which maximum attainable speeds are received and tracked by the controller. Simulation results using CarSim are provided for a vehicle traveling over a technical race course, encompassing many turn variations. The proposed system is shown to outperform a reference PID control system by achieving higher speeds around the race track without losing control.