Design and Simulation for Path Tracking Control of a Commercial Vehicle Using MPC

The design of the robotic vehicle VILMA at UNICAMP is developed in-vehicle platform Fiat Punto. In addition to a set of sensors, actuators, mechanism and components (hardware and/or software), new technologies should be developed in support of Automation, Control, Perception, Localization and Navigation. This work presents the design and simulation of path tracking control using model predictive control (MPC) which attempts to exploit the characteristics of the structured environment where the future path is previously known. The model for design the controller is based in a single tracking model of the vehicle and in a model of the steering which the state variables are observed by the Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). Finally, it is explained how the path is smoothed generating an arc between the points and making an optimization process by the gradient algorithm.