This paper describes a robust control design for automatic steering of pass
enger cars. Previous studies showed that reliable automatic driving at high
way speed may not be achieved under practical conditions with look-down ref
erence systems which use only one sensor at the front bumper to measure the
lateral displacement of the vehicle from the lane reference. An additional
lateral displacement sensor is added here at the tail bumper to solve the
automatic steering control problem. The control design is performed stepwis
e: First, an initial controller is determined using the parameter space app
roach in an invariance plane. This controller is then refined to accommodat
e practical constraints and finally optimized using the multiobjective opti
mization program (MOPS). The performance and robustness of the final contro
ller was verified experimentally at California PATH in a series of test run
s.