AUTONOMOUS LATERAL CONTROL OF VEHICLES IN AN AUTOMATED HIGHWAY SYSTEM

Lateral control of vehicles in IVHS requires the installation of on-bo ard sensors as well as the installation of roadway hardware such as ca bles, magnets, etc. Existing control approaches in PATH require road c urvature and vehicle lateral position (with respect to the center of t he lane) information. Hence these approaches rely.on roadway sensors t o obtain relative lateral position. These methods will necessitate inf rastructural changes to the highway. This paper introduces the concept of autonomous lateral control or auto-tracking. The method allows us to use only line-of-sight sensor information to effect vehicle control . We present a detailed vehicle model. Controllers have been proposed to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed auto-tracking scheme. We also examine the possibilities of using this method for lane chang e purposes in an automated highway system.