Using the centre of percussion to design a steering controller for an autonomous race car

Understanding how a race car driver controls a vehicle at its friction limits can provide insights into the development of vehicle safety systems. In this paper, a race car driver's behaviour inspires the design of an autonomous racing controller. The resulting controller uses the vehicle's centre of percussion (COP) to design feedforward and feedback steering. At the COP, the effects of rotation and translation from the rear tire force cancel each other out; consequently, the feedforward steering command is robust to the disturbances from the rear tire force. Using the COP also simplifies the equations of motion, as the vehicle's lateral motion is decoupled from the vehicle's yaw motion and highlights the challenge of controlling a vehicle when the rear tires are highly saturated. The resulting dynamics can be controlled with a linear state feedback based on a lane-keeping system with additional yaw damping. Utilising Lyapunov theory, the closed-loop system is shown to remain stable even when the rear tires are highly saturated. The experimental results demonstrate that an autonomous vehicle can operate at its limits while maintaining a minimal lateral error.