Abstract
The research on autonomous vehicles is highly multidisciplinary and includes many components from different domains of engineering. Besides perception, localization, and path planning, the control system design and implementation is vital for a successful autonomous vehicle operation. From the perspective of control systems, autonomous vehicle control can be categorized into longitudinal and lateral automation. Longitudinal automation is related to vehicle speed control. On the other hand, lateral automation considers path following control with steering actuator. This chapter focuses on the path following the control system design which is used to minimize the lateral deviation error from the reference path while traveling at the desired speed. Firstly, a linear path following autonomous vehicle model is introduced in state space representation. This model is used to design feedback linear control systems such as PID and linear quadratic optimal controllers. Simulations are conducted for different scenarios. In the simulation studies, a high degree-of- freedom vehicle model is employed to get realistic results. Finally, the results are obtained and analyzed in terms of lateral deviation, vehicle speed, and front wheel steering angle. The performances of different control systems are also compared numerically by using statistical error values.