A new robust control system with optimized use of the lane detection data for vehicle full lateral control under strong curvatures

In this work, we have proposed and implemented in our prototype vehicle a complete lateral control system that works with a good performance even for strong curvatures. The proposed system has important new features with respect to the known systems. While a lookahead distance linear with the speed is often proposed, we have proposed here a quadratic lookahead distance of the speed, that improved considerably the tracking of the lane in curves. A strategy to optimize the use of the information coming from the lane detection module is also proposed. The logics is, if we do not have optimal lane detection exactly in the desired lookahead distance, but in the proximities of this distance we can still control the vehicle with high accuracy. Finally, we have proposed a visual interface that alerts the driver in the case of a degradation in the lane detection. The driver can deactivate the lateral control whenever he wants by simply counteracting the system and an automatic reactivation of the system is provided under strict conditions on the vehicle positioning and on the quality of the lane detection