Lateral control of autonomous vehicles based on fuzzy logic

Autonomous vehicles have attracted considerable attention in the research community and industry due to their potential benefits to unmanned driving and assisted driving. This paper addresses the problem of designing lateral control law and the strategy of determining the giving speed for autonomous vehicles. An improved method of calculating lateral offset and angle error based on multiple look-ahead distances is proposed to reduce the impact of noise in reference path data on the lateral control system. Multiple fuzzy inference engines are used to design the steering controller and determine the given driving speed including forward and backward to deal with both simple and complex reference paths. Satisfactory simulation and experimental results have been obtained for different reference paths including a path with U-turn task in which backward driving is needed.