Curve Tracking Control for Autonomous Vehicles with Rigidly Mounted Range Sensors

Abstract

In this paper, we present feedback control laws for an autonomous vehicle with rigidly mounted range sensors to track a desired curve. In particular, we consider a vehicle that has a group of rays around two center rays that are perpendicular to the velocity of the vehicle. Under such a sensor configuration, singularities are bound to occur in the curve tracking feedback control law when tracking concave curves. To overcome this singularity, we derive a hybrid strategy of switching between control laws when the vehicle gets close to singularities. Rigorous proof and extensive simulation results verify the validity of the proposed feedback control law.