Passivity analysis and design of passivity-based controllers for trajectory tracking at high speed of autonomous vehicles

Autonomous intelligent vehicles are under intensive development, especially this last decade. This paper focuses on the lateral control of intelligent vehicles, with the aim of minimizing the lateral displacement of the autonomous vehicle with respect to a given reference trajectory. The control input is the steering angle and the output is the lateral error displacement. After passivity analysis of the system to establish the properties of passivity between some inputs and outputs, we present design and validation of lateral controllers based on passivity, to ensure robust stability and good performances with respect to parametric variations and uncertainties encountered in driving applications. The control strategies have been validated in closed-loop on SCANeR^TM studio [1], a driving simulation engine, according to several real driving scenarios. The validation shows robustness and good performances of the proposed control approaches, and puts in evidence the improvement brought by the proposed Nested Passivity-Based Controller (PBC).