Abstract
This paper presents steering system requirements to ensure the stabilized lateral control of autonomous driving vehicles. The two main objectives of a lateral controller in autonomous vehicles are maintenance of vehicle stability and tracking of the desired path. Even if the desired steering angle is immediately determined by the upper level controller, the overall controller performance is greatly influenced by the specification of steering system actuators. Since one of the major inescapable traits that affects controller performance is the time delay of the steering actuator, our work is mainly focused on finding adequate parameters of high level control algorithm to compensate these response characteristics and guarantee vehicle stability. Actual vehicle steering angle response was obtained with Electric Power Steering (EPS) actuator test subject to various longitudinal velocity. Steering input and output response analysis was performed via MATLAB system identification toolbox. The use of system identification is advantageous since the transfer function of the system is conveniently obtained compared with methods that require actual mathematical modeling of the system. Simulation results of full vehicle model suggest that the obtained tuning parameter yields reduced oscillation and lateral error compared with other cases, thus enhancing path tracking performance.
