Time-varying steering control for an autonomous highway vehicle

An automated steering controller design is presented for a fundamentally new driving maneuver. The task for the controller is to steer the vehicle through a series of lane change maneuvers while travelling at a time-varying speed. A linear, time-varying steering controller is synthesized using a design procedure based on the solution of a H_∞ optimal control problem. This controller is compared to several time-invariant steering controllers and it is shown that the time-varying controller provides performance that a time-invariant controller can not achieve