An adaptive preview path tracker for off-road autonomous driving

A path tracking algorithm with adaptive preview distance based on roadside sampling is proposed in order to solve the path tracking control problems of autonomous driving in the complex off-road environment. The proposed lateral and longitudinal control laws involve both feedback control and feedforward control. We have reformulated the lateral control problem as an optimal control problem, and the designed trajectory is planned by taking the kinematic constrains of the vehicle and the preview road information pertaining to road curvature and road width into account. The desired lateral control command is directly decided by the curvature of the planned circular curves and the longitudinal velocity is planned by utilizing the preview information and the planned circular curves. In the meantime, the feedback control laws are designed by adopting inverse model of the vehicle dynamics. We implement our control method on the 14-DOF vehicle simulation model. And the simulation results are presented and discussed.