Automatic Steering Methods for Autonomous Automobile Path Tracking

This research derives, implements, tunes and compares selected path tracking methods for controlling a car-like robot along a predetermined path. The scope includes commonly used m ethods found in practice as well as some theoretical methods found in various literature from other areas of rese arch. This work reviews literature and identifies important path tracking models and control algorithms from the vast back ground and resources. This paper augments the literature with a comprehensive collection of important path tracking idea s, a guide to their implementations and, most importantly, an independent and realistic comparison of the perfor mance of these various approaches. This document does not catalog all of the work in vehicle modeling and control; only a selection that is perceived to be important ideas when considering practical system identification, ease of implementation/tuning and computational efficiency. There are several other methods that meet this criteria, ho wever they are deemed similar to one or more of the approaches presented and are not included. The performance r esults, analysis and comparison of tracking methods ultimately reveal that none of the approaches work well in all applications a nd that they have some complementary characteristics. These complementary characteristics lead to an idea that a combination of methods may be useful for more general applications. Additionally, applications for which the methods in this paper do not provide adequate solutions are identified.