Design and experiments of ALV longitudinal speed controllers based on a disturbance observer

This paper develops a longitudinal speed controller for both on-road and off-road driving of autonomous land vehicles (ALVs) by introducing a disturbance observer. The disturbance observer is designed to estimate the disturbances of the environment and the model errors through using the difference between the outputs of the reference model and the ALV. After being filtered, the disturbances are compensated by the inverse of the model. The stability and robustness of the controller have also been discussed theoretically and validated experimentally. The controller´s performance in the urban traffic environment and the experimental results on the off-road terrain show that the presented controller is effective for both on-road and off-road autonomous driving.