A constrained wheel torque controller for lane following system using control distribution

A lane following system is proposed that employs four constrained wheel torques to regulate a vehicle on a reference trajectory. The proposed control algorithm was developed by combining several techniques such as: DYC method, hierarchical control architecture, sliding mode controls, control distributions, and etc. Different from existing approaches, the proposed method has the following advantages: (1) it can be implemented on two-wheel drive vehicles; (2) the error resulting from the hierarchical architecture are minimized and compensated; (3) the controlled wheel torque calculated by the control distribution method is an analytical solution instead of from numerical search. The proposed controller is evaluated by simulations on two more complex vehicle models: a full-state vehicle model and a sedan model from commercial software Carsim. Simulation results indicate that, in both cases, the proposed method can regulate the vehicle to finish a single lane change when the vehicle is moving at an initial speed of 90 km/hr.