Fault Tolerant Autonomous Lateral Control for Heavy Vehicles

This report summarizes the research results of TO4233, "Fault Tolerant Autonomous Lateral Control for Heavy Vehicles". This project represents a continuing effort of PATH's research on Automated Highway Systems (AHS) and more specifically in the area of heavy vehicles. Research on the lateral control of heavy vehicles for AHS has been going on at PATH since 1993. MOU129, "Steering and Braking Control of Heavy Duty Vehicles" was the first project and it was followed by MOU242, "Lateral Control of Commercial Heavy Duty Vehicle". Both projects were concerned mostly with the theoretical portion of the problem, i.e. model development, analysis of the dynamic model from the lateral control point of view, and the lateral controller designs. The first experimental results were shown in MOU289 (MOU313), "Lateral Control of Heavy Duty Vehicles for Automated Highway Systems", where the theoretical model was validated and calibrated to the dynamic behavior of an actual tractor-semitrailer vehicle, which was obtained and instrumented. In addition, preliminary closed-loop experiments were performed. A more comprehensive study on a large variety of control strategies was presented in MOU385 and TO4201, "Robust Lateral Control of Heavy Duty Vehicles".