A new fuzzy speed control strategy considering lateral vehicle dynamics

This paper introduces a new speed control strategy for autonomous/semi-autonomous navigation of ground vehicles. Different from the previous studies, steering angle is considered in addition to speed error and integral of the speed error. Because of the highly nonlinear nature of vehicle model, fuzzy logic strategy is used for controller design. Vehicle modeling equations and used parameters are also illustrated in the paper. Simulations are carried out to verify and demonstrate the effectiveness of the new method over the classical one which does not consider the steering angle. Both of these two methods have similar performances when steering angle is relatively low. However, in a more aggressive steering scenario, classical approach fails and vehicle loses its yaw stability while our method still continues to track the speed with a stable yaw dynamics.